Converse bounds for private communication over quantum channels

This paper establishes several converse bounds on the private transmission capabilities of a quantum channel. The main conceptual development builds firmly on the notion of a private state, which is a powerful, uniquely quantum method for simplifying the tripartite picture of privacy involving local operations and public classical communication to a bipartite picture of quantum privacy involving local operations and classical communication. This approach has previously led to some of the strongest upper bounds on secret key rates, including the squashed entanglement and the relative entropy of entanglement. Here we use this approach along with a "privacy test" to establish a general meta-converse bound for private communication, which has a number of applications. The meta-converse allows for proving that any quantum channel's relative entropy of entanglement is a strong converse rate for private communication. For covariant channels, the meta-converse also leads to second-order expansions of relative entropy of entanglement bounds for private communication rates. For such channels, the bounds also apply to the private communication setting in which the sender and receiver are assisted by unlimited public classical communication, and as such, they are relevant for establishing various converse bounds for quantum key distribution protocols conducted over these channels. We find precise characterizations for several channels of interest and apply the methods to establish several converse bounds on the private transmission capabilities of all phase-insensitive bosonic channels.Comment: v3: 53 pages, 3 figures, final version accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Strong converse theorems using R\'enyi entropies

We use a R\'enyi entropy method to prove strong converse theorems for certain information-theoretic tasks which involve local operations and quantum or classical communication between two parties. These include state redistribution, coherent state merging, quantum state splitting, measurement compression with quantum side information, randomness extraction against quantum side information, and data compression with quantum side information. The method we employ in proving these results extends ideas developed by Sharma [arXiv:1404.5940], which he used to give a new proof of the strong converse theorem for state merging. For state redistribution, we prove the strong converse property for the boundary of the entire achievable rate region in the $(e,q)$-plane, where $e$ and $q$ denote the entanglement cost and quantum communication cost, respectively. In the case of measurement compression with quantum side information, we prove a strong converse theorem for the classical communication cost, which is a new result extending the previously known weak converse. For the remaining tasks, we provide new proofs for strong converse theorems previously established using smooth entropies. For each task, we obtain the strong converse theorem from explicit bounds on the figure of merit of the task in terms of a R\'enyi generalization of the optimal rate. Hence, we identify candidates for the strong converse exponents for each task discussed in this paper. To prove our results, we establish various new entropic inequalities, which might be of independent interest. These involve conditional entropies and mutual information derived from the sandwiched R\'enyi divergence. In particular, we obtain novel bounds relating these quantities, as well as the R\'enyi conditional mutual information, to the fidelity of two quantum states.Comment: 40 pages, 5 figures; v4: Accepted for publication in Journal of Mathematical Physic

On converse bounds for classical communication over quantum channels

We explore several new converse bounds for classical communication over quantum channels in both the one-shot and asymptotic regimes. First, we show that the Matthews-Wehner meta-converse bound for entanglement-assisted classical communication can be achieved by activated, no-signalling assisted codes, suitably generalizing a result for classical channels. Second, we derive a new efficiently computable meta-converse on the amount of classical information unassisted codes can transmit over a single use of a quantum channel. As applications, we provide a finite resource analysis of classical communication over quantum erasure channels, including the second-order and moderate deviation asymptotics. Third, we explore the asymptotic analogue of our new meta-converse, the $\Upsilon$-information of the channel. We show that its regularization is an upper bound on the classical capacity, which is generally tighter than the entanglement-assisted capacity and other known efficiently computable strong converse bounds. For covariant channels we show that the $\Upsilon$-information is a strong converse bound.Comment: v3: published version; v2: 18 pages, presentation and results improve

Semidefinite programming converse bounds for quantum communication

We derive several efficiently computable converse bounds for quantum communication over quantum channels in both the one-shot and asymptotic regime. First, we derive one-shot semidefinite programming (SDP) converse bounds on the amount of quantum information that can be transmitted over a single use of a quantum channel, which improve the previous bound from [Tomamichel/Berta/Renes, Nat. Commun. 7, 2016]. As applications, we study quantum communication over depolarizing channels and amplitude damping channels with finite resources. Second, we find an SDP strong converse bound for the quantum capacity of an arbitrary quantum channel, which means the fidelity of any sequence of codes with a rate exceeding this bound will vanish exponentially fast as the number of channel uses increases. Furthermore, we prove that the SDP strong converse bound improves the partial transposition bound introduced by Holevo and Werner. Third, we prove that this SDP strong converse bound is equal to the so-called max-Rains information, which is an analog to the Rains information introduced in [Tomamichel/Wilde/Winter, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 63:715, 2017]. Our SDP strong converse bound is weaker than the Rains information, but it is efficiently computable for general quantum channels.Comment: 17 pages, extended version of arXiv:1601.06888. v3 is closed to the published version, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, 201

Converse bounds for private communication over quantum channels

© 1963-2012 IEEE. This paper establishes several converse bounds on the private transmission capabilities of a quantum channel. The main conceptual development builds firmly on the notion of a private state, which is a powerful, uniquely quantum method for simplifying the tripartite picture of privacy involving local operations and public classical communication to a bipartite picture of quantum privacy involving local operations and classical communication. This approach has previously led to some of the strongest upper bounds on secret key rates, including the squashed entanglement and the relative entropy of entanglement. Here, we use this approach along with a 'privacy test' to establish a general meta-converse bound for private communication, which has a number of applications. The meta-converse allows for proving that any quantum channel's relative entropy of entanglement is a strong converse rate for private communication. For covariant channels, the meta-converse also leads to second-order expansions of relative entropy of entanglement bounds for private communication rates. For such channels, the bounds also apply to the private communication setting in which the sender and the receiver are assisted by unlimited public classical communication, and as such, they are relevant for establishing various converse bounds for quantum key distribution protocols conducted over these channels. We find precise characterizations for several channels of interest and apply the methods to establish converse bounds on the private transmission capabilities of all phase-insensitive bosonic channels

Smooth Entropy Bounds on One-Shot Quantum State Redistribution

In quantum state redistribution as introduced in [Luo and Devetak (2009)] and [Devetak and Yard (2008)], there are four systems of interest: the $A$ system held by Alice, the $B$ system held by Bob, the $C$ system that is to be transmitted from Alice to Bob, and the $R$ system that holds a purification of the state in the $ABC$ registers. We give upper and lower bounds on the amount of quantum communication and entanglement required to perform the task of quantum state redistribution in a one-shot setting. Our bounds are in terms of the smooth conditional min- and max-entropy, and the smooth max-information. The protocol for the upper bound has a clear structure, building on the work [Oppenheim (2008)]: it decomposes the quantum state redistribution task into two simpler quantum state merging tasks by introducing a coherent relay. In the independent and identical (iid) asymptotic limit our bounds for the quantum communication cost converge to the quantum conditional mutual information $I(C:R|B)$, and our bounds for the total cost converge to the conditional entropy $H(C|B)$. This yields an alternative proof of optimality of these rates for quantum state redistribution in the iid asymptotic limit. In particular, we obtain a strong converse for quantum state redistribution, which even holds when allowing for feedback.Comment: v3: 29 pages, 1 figure, extended strong converse discussio

Semidefinite programming strong converse bounds for classical capacity

© 2017 IEEE. We investigate the classical communication over quantum channels when assisted by no-signaling and positive-partial-transpose-preserving (PPT) codes, for which both the optimal success probability of a given transmission rate and the one-shot -error capacity are formalized as semidefinite programs (SDPs). Based on this, we obtain improved SDP finite blocklength converse bounds of general quantum channels for entanglement-assisted codes and unassisted codes. Furthermore, we derive two SDP strong converse bounds for the classical capacity of general quantum channels: for any code with a rate exceeding either of the two bounds of the channel, the success probability vanishes exponentially fast as the number of channel uses increases. In particular, applying our efficiently computable bounds, we derive an improved upper bound on the classical capacity of the amplitude damping channel. We also establish the strong converse property for the classical and private capacities of a new class of quantum channels. We finally study the zero-error setting and provide efficiently computable upper bounds on the one-shot zero-error capacity of a general quantum channel

Semidefinite programming converse bounds for classical communication over quantum channels

© 2017 IEEE. We study the classical communication over quantum channels when assisted by no-signalling (NS) and PPT-preserving (PPT) codes. We first show that both the optimal success probability of a given transmission rate and one-shot-error capacity can be formalized as semidefinite programs (SDPs) when assisted by NS or NS∩PPT codes. Based on this, we derive SDP finite blocklength converse bounds for general quantum channels, which also reduce to the converse bound of Polyanskiy, Poor, and Verdii for classical channels. Furthermore, we derive an SDP strong converse bound for the classical capacity of a general quantum channel: for any code with a rate exceeding this bound, the optimal success probability vanishes exponentially fast as the number of channel uses increases. In particular, applying our efficiently computable bound, we derive improved upper bounds to the classical capacity of the amplitude damping channels and also establish the strong converse property for a new class of quantum channels