Remote preparation of quantum states

Remote state preparation is the variant of quantum state teleportation in which the sender knows the quantum state to be communicated. The original paper introducing teleportation established minimal requirements for classical communication and entanglement but the corresponding limits for remote state preparation have remained unknown until now: previous work has shown, however, that it not only requires less classical communication but also gives rise to a trade-off between these two resources in the appropriate setting. We discuss this problem from first principles, including the various choices one may follow in the definitions of the actual resources. Our main result is a general method of remote state preparation for arbitrary states of many qubits, at a cost of 1 bit of classical communication and 1 bit of entanglement per qubit sent. In this "universal" formulation, these ebit and cbit requirements are shown to be simultaneously optimal by exhibiting a dichotomy. Our protocol then yields the exact trade-off curve for arbitrary ensembles of pure states and pure entangled states (including the case of incomplete knowledge of the ensemble probabilities), based on the recently established quantum-classical trade-off for quantum data compression. The paper includes an extensive discussion of our results, including the impact of the choice of model on the resources, the topic of obliviousness, and an application to private quantum channels and quantum data hiding.Comment: 21 pages plus 2 figures (eps), revtex4. v2 corrects some errors and adds obliviousness discussion. v3 has section VI C deleted and various minor oversights correcte

On Classical Teleportation and Classical Nonlocality

An interesting protocol for classical teleportation of an unknown classical state was recently suggested by Cohen, and by Gour and Meyer. In that protocol, Bob can sample from a probability distribution P that is given to Alice, even if Alice has absolutely no knowledge about P. Pursuing a similar line of thought, we suggest here a limited form of nonlocality - "classical nonlocality". Our nonlocality is the (somewhat limited) classical analogue of the Hughston-Jozsa-Wootters (HJW) quantum nonlocality. The HJW nonlocality tells us how, for a given density matrix rho, Alice can generate any rho-ensemble on the North Star. This is done using surprisingly few resources - one shared entangled state (prepared in advance), one generalized quantum measurement, and no communication. Similarly, our classical nonlocality presents how, for a given probability distribution P, Alice can generate any P-ensemble on the North Star, using only one correlated state (prepared in advance), one (generalized) classical measurement, and no communication. It is important to clarify that while the classical teleportation and the classical non-locality protocols are probably rather insignificant from a classical information processing point of view, they significantly contribute to our understanding of what exactly is quantum in their well established and highly famous quantum analogues.Comment: 8 pages, Version 2 is using the term "quantum remote steering" to describe HJW idea, and "classical remote steering" is the main new result of this current paper. Version 2 also has an additional citation (to Gisin's 89 paper

On the capacities of bipartite Hamiltonians and unitary gates

We consider interactions as bidirectional channels. We investigate the capacities for interaction Hamiltonians and nonlocal unitary gates to generate entanglement and transmit classical information. We give analytic expressions for the entanglement generating capacity and entanglement-assisted one-way classical communication capacity of interactions, and show that these quantities are additive, so that the asymptotic capacities equal the corresponding 1-shot capacities. We give general bounds on other capacities, discuss some examples, and conclude with some open questions.Comment: V3: extensively rewritten. V4: a mistaken reference to a conjecture by Kraus and Cirac [quant-ph/0011050] removed and a mistake in the order of authors in Ref. [53] correcte

Optimal Gaussian Entanglement Swapping

We consider entanglement swapping with general mixed two-mode Gaussian states and calculate the optimal gains for a broad class of such states including those states most relevant in communication scenarios. We show that for this class of states, entanglement swapping adds no additional mixedness, that is the ensemble average output state has the same purity as the input states. This implies that, by using intermediate entanglement swapping steps, it is, in principle, possible to distribute entangled two-mode Gaussian states of higher purity as compared to direct transmission. We then apply the general results on optimal Gaussian swapping to the problem of quantum communication over a lossy fiber and demonstrate that, contrary to negative conclusions in the literature, swapping-based schemes in fact often perform better than direct transmission for high input squeezing. However, an effective transmission analysis reveals that the hope for improved performance based on optimal Gaussian entanglement swapping is spurious since the swapping does not lead to an enhancement of the effective transmission. This implies that the same or better results can always be obtained using direct transmission in combination with, in general, less squeezing.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figures, minor corrections in version 2 with one reference added (ref.9