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Recently, I have been working with quantum channel capacity for quantum-quantum channels and I was wondering if there exist some results for channel compositions.

Specifically, I have been looking for results on what happens to quantum channel capacity when a serial composition of quantum channels is considered, i.e. $C(\mathcal{N_1}\circ\mathcal{N_2}) = ?$ where $\mathcal{N_1}$ and $\mathcal{N_2}$ are the quantum channels in consideration.

The channels are described by their Kraus operators $\{E_k^1\}$ and $\{E_j^2\}$. Note that the serial composition channel is a quantum channel that will be described by Kraus operators $\{E_k^1 \cdot E_j^2\}$, i.e. all the possible products of the Kraus operators of the individual channels.

I have been looking around but have not found anything interesting yet. I would appreciate any information, partial results and especially literature on the topic.

Adam Zalcman
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1 Answers1

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TL;DR

Quantum capacity of $\mathcal{N}_2\circ\mathcal{N}_1$ can be anywhere between zero and the minimum of the quantum capacities of $\mathcal{N}_1$ and $\mathcal{N}_2$.

Background

Quantum capacity of a quantum channel $\mathcal{N}$ is defined as the greatest real number $Q(\mathcal{N})$ such that for any $R < Q(\mathcal{N})$ (representing a transmission rate) and any $\delta > 0$ (representing an acceptable error rate), there exists a quantum error correcting code with encoding operation $\mathcal{E}$ that maps $m$ qubits into $n$ inputs to the channel $\mathcal{N}$ and decoding operation $\mathcal{D}$ that maps $n$ outputs from the channel $\mathcal{N}$ to $m$ qubits which enables recovery of any $m$-qubit input state $|\psi\rangle$ with fidelity $1-\delta$ and such that $\frac{m}{n} > R$. See also discussion on page $1$ and figure $1$ on page $4$ in this paper.

Let $\mathcal{N}_2\circ\mathcal{N}_1$ denote the channel representing the application of $\mathcal{N}_1$ followed by the application of $\mathcal{N}_2$ and note that

$$ 0 \le Q(\mathcal{N}_2\circ\mathcal{N}_1) \le \min(Q(\mathcal{N}_1),Q(\mathcal{N}_2)).\tag1 $$

The first inequality follows from the fact $m$ and $n$ in the definition above are non-negative integers and therefore $Q(\mathcal{N})$ is a non-negative real number for any channel $\mathcal{N}$. The second inequality follows from the fact that we can absorb $\mathcal{N}_1$ (respectively, $\mathcal{N}_2$) into the encoding operation $\mathcal{E}$ (respectively, the decoding operation $\mathcal{D}$) to improve $Q(\mathcal{N}_2)$ (respectively, $Q(\mathcal{N}_1)$) to at least $Q(\mathcal{N}_2\circ\mathcal{N}_1)$.

Two extreme cases

Can we tighten the bounds in $(1)$? It turns out that without additional assumptions on the channels, we can't. To show this, we will use the quantum erasure channel

$$ \mathcal{R}_\epsilon(\rho) = (1 - \epsilon)\rho + \epsilon|2\rangle\langle 2| $$

to construct two examples, one saturating the left inequality in $(1)$ and one saturating the right inequality. We choose the erasure channel because its quantum capacity is known and is given by the formula

$$ Q(\mathcal{R}_\epsilon) = \max(0, 1 - 2\epsilon),\tag2 $$

see equation $(2)$ on page $2$ (and figure $2(a)$ on page $4$) in this paper. Now, the effect of composing two instances of the erasure channel is

$$ \begin{align} \mathcal{R}_\epsilon(\mathcal{R}_\epsilon(\rho)) &= (1 - \epsilon)\mathcal{R}_\epsilon(\rho) + \epsilon\mathcal{R}_\epsilon(|2\rangle\langle 2|) \\ &= (1 - \epsilon)^2\rho + (2\epsilon - \epsilon^2)|2\rangle\langle 2| \\ &= \mathcal{R}_{2\epsilon-\epsilon^2}(\rho). \end{align} $$

Thus,

$$ \begin{align} 0 &\le Q(\mathcal{R}_{1/3} \circ \mathcal{R}_{1/3}) \le \min(Q(\mathcal{R}_{1/3}), Q(\mathcal{R}_{1/3})) \\ 0 &\le Q(\mathcal{R}_{5/9}) \le \min\left(\frac13, \frac13\right) \\ 0 &\le 0 \le \frac13 \\ \end{align} $$

saturating the left inequality in $(1)$ and

$$ \begin{align} 0 &\le Q(\mathcal{R}_0 \circ \mathcal{R}_0) \le \min(Q(\mathcal{R}_0), Q(\mathcal{R}_0)) \\ 0 &\le Q(\mathcal{R}_0) \le \min\left(1, 1\right) \\ 0 &\le 1 \le 1 \\ \end{align} $$

saturating the right inequality in $(1)$.

Adam Zalcman
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