Reliability function of general classical-quantum channel

Abstract

In information theory the reliability function and its bounds, describing the exponential behavior of the error probability, are the most important quantitative characteristics of the channel performance. From a general point of view, these bounds provide certain measures of distinguishability of a given set of states. In an earlier paper we introduced quantum analogs of the random coding and the expurgation lower bounds for the case of pure signal states. Here we discuss the general case, in particular, we prove the previously conjectured expurgation bound and find the quantum cutoff rate in the case of arbitrary mixed signal states.Comment: 15 pages, partially reported at the Workshop on Complexity, Computation and Physics of Information, Cambridge, July 5-23, 1999; to appear in IEEE Trans. on Information Theory. Several corrections suggested by the referees are include