General theory of environment-assisted entanglement distillation

We evaluate the one-shot entanglement of assistance for an arbitrary bipartite state. This yields another interesting result, namely a characterization of the one-shot distillable entanglement of a bipartite pure state. This result is shown to be stronger than that obtained by specializing the one-shot hashing bound to pure states. Finally, we show how the one-shot result yields the operational interpretation of the asymptotic entanglement of assistance proved in [Smolin et al., Phys. Rev. A 72, 052317 (2005)].Comment: 23 pages, one column, final published versio

The quantum capacity of channels with arbitrarily correlated noise

We study optimal rates for quantum communication over a single use of a channel, which itself can correspond to a finite number of uses of a channel with arbitrarily correlated noise. The corresponding capacity is often referred to as the one-shot quantum capacity. In this paper, we prove bounds on the one-shot quantum capacity of an arbitrary channel. This allows us to compute the quantum capacity of a channel with arbitrarily correlated noise, in the limit of asymptotically many uses of the channel. In the memoryless case, we explicitly show that our results reduce to known expressions for the quantum capacity.Comment: 15 pages, two columns. Final improved version - to appear in IEE