Comment on "Optimum Quantum Error Recovery using Semidefinite Programming"

In a recent paper ([1]=quant-ph/0606035) it is shown how the optimal recovery operation in an error correction scheme can be considered as a semidefinite program. As a possible future improvement it is noted that still better error correction might be obtained by optimizing the encoding as well. In this note we present the result of such an improvement, specifically for the four-bit correction of an amplitude damping channel considered in [1]. We get a strict improvement for almost all values of the damping parameter. The method (and the computer code) is taken from our earlier study of such correction schemes (quant-ph/0307138).Comment: 2 pages, 1 figur

Notes on multiplicativity of maximal output purity for completely positive qubit maps

A problem in quantum information theory that has received considerable attention in recent years is the question of multiplicativity of the so-called maximal output purity (MOP) of a quantum channel. This quantity is defined as the maximum value of the purity one can get at the output of a channel by varying over all physical input states, when purity is measured by the Schatten $q$-norm, and is denoted by $\nu_q$. The multiplicativity problem is the question whether two channels used in parallel have a combined $\nu_q$ that is the product of the $\nu_q$ of the two channels. A positive answer would imply a number of other additivity results in QIT. Very recently, P. Hayden has found counterexamples for every value of $q>1$. Nevertheless, these counterexamples require that the dimension of these channels increases with $1-q$ and therefore do not rule out multiplicativity for $q$ in intervals $[1,q_0)$ with $q_0$ depending on the channel dimension. I argue that this would be enough to prove additivity of entanglement of formation and of the classical capacity of quantum channels. More importantly, no counterexamples have as yet been found in the important special case where one of the channels is a qubit-channel, i.e. its input states are 2-dimensional. In this paper I focus attention to this qubit case and I rephrase the multiplicativity conjecture in the language of block matrices and prove the conjecture in a number of special cases.Comment: Manuscript for a talk presented at the SSPCM07 conference in Myczkowce, Poland, 10/09/2007. 12 page

Effect of nonnegativity on estimation errors in one-qubit state tomography with finite data

We analyze the behavior of estimation errors evaluated by two loss functions, the Hilbert-Schmidt distance and infidelity, in one-qubit state tomography with finite data. We show numerically that there can be a large gap between the estimation errors and those predicted by an asymptotic analysis. The origin of this discrepancy is the existence of the boundary in the state space imposed by the requirement that density matrices be nonnegative (positive semidefinite). We derive an explicit form of a function reproducing the behavior of the estimation errors with high accuracy by introducing two approximations: a Gaussian approximation of the multinomial distributions of outcomes, and linearizing the boundary. This function gives us an intuition for the behavior of the expected losses for finite data sets. We show that this function can be used to determine the amount of data necessary for the estimation to be treated reliably with the asymptotic theory. We give an explicit expression for this amount, which exhibits strong sensitivity to the true quantum state as well as the choice of measurement.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, One figure (FIG. 1) is added to the previous version, and some typos are correcte

Binegativity and geometry of entangled states in two qubits

We prove that the binegativity is always positive for any two-qubit state. As a result, as suggested by the previous works, the asymptotic relative entropy of entanglement in two qubits does not exceed the Rains bound, and the PPT-entanglement cost for any two-qubit state is determined to be the logarithmic negativity of the state. Further, the proof reveals some geometrical characteristics of the entangled states, and shows that the partial transposition can give another separable approximation of the entangled state in two qubits.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures. I made the proof more transparen