The pitfalls of deciding whether a quantum channel is (conjugate) degradable and how to avoid them

To decide whether a quantum channel is degradable is relatively easy: one has to find at least one example of a degrading quantum channel. But in general, no conclusive criterion exists to show the opposite. Using elementary methods we derive a necessary and sufficient condition to decide under what circumstances the conclusion is unambiguous. The findings lead to an extension of the antidegradability region for qubit and qutrit transpose depolarizing channels. In the qubit case we reproduce the known results for the class of qubit depolarizing channels (due to their equivalence). One of the consequences is that the optimal qubit and qutrit asymmetric cloners possess a single-letter quantum capacity formula. We also investigate the ramifications of the criterion for the search of exclusively conjugate degradable channels.Comment: v2: Full rank assumption added to the main theorem; to appear in Open Systems & Information Dynamic

Hiking a generalized Dyck path: A tractable way of calculating multimode boson evolution operators

A time evolution operator in the interaction picture is given by exponentiating an interaction Hamiltonian $H$. Important examples of Hamiltonians, often encountered in quantum optics, condensed matter and high energy physics, are of a general form $H=r(A^\dagger-A)$, where $A$ is a multimode boson operator and $r$ is the coupling constant. If no simple factorization formula for the evolution operator exists, the calculation of the evolution operator is a notoriously difficult problem. In this case the only available option may be to Taylor expand the operator in $r$ and act on a state of interest $\psi$. But this brute-force method quickly hits the complexity barrier since the number of evaluated expressions increases exponentially. We relate a combinatorial structure called Dyck paths to the action of a boson word (monomial) and a large class of monomial sums on a quantum state $\psi$. This allows us to cross the exponential gap and make the problem of a boson unitary operator evaluation computationally tractable by achieving polynomial-time complexity for an extensive family of physically interesting multimode Hamiltonians. We further test our method on a cubic boson Hamiltonian whose Taylor series is known to diverge for all nonzero values of the coupling constant and an analytic continuation via a Pad\'e approximant must be performed.Comment: v4: published versio

An Infinite Sequence of Additive Channels: the Classical Capacity of Cloning Channels

We introduce an infinite sequence of quantum channels for which the Holevo capacity is additive. The channel series is closely related to the quantum channels arising from universal quantum cloning machines. The additivity proof is motivated by a special property the studied channels enjoy: the property of conjugate degradability. As a consequence of the announced proof, we also provide an easy way of proving the additivity of the Holevo capacity for the original Unruh channel for which the quantum capacity is already known. Consequently, we present not only an infinite series of finite-dimensional channels but also a nontrivial example of an infinite-dimensional channel for which the classical and quantum channel capacities are easily calculable.Comment: Annoying typo fixe