The quantum capacity of a noisy quantum channel determines the maximal rate at which we can code reliably over asymptotically many uses of the channel, and it characterizes the channel's ultimate ability to transmit quantum information coherently. In this paper, we derive single-letter upper bounds on the quantum and private capacities of quantum channels. The quantum capacity of a quantum channel is always no larger than the quantum capacity of its extended channels, since the extensions of the channel can be considered as assistance from the environment. By optimizing the parametrized extended channels with specific structures such as the flag structure, we obtain new upper bounds on the quantum capacity of the original quantum channel. Furthermore, we extend our approach to estimating the fundamental limits of private communication and one-way entanglement distillation. As notable applications, we establish improved upper bounds to the quantum and private capacities for fundamental quantum channels of interest in quantum information, some of which are also the sources of noise in superconducting quantum computing. In particular, our upper bounds on the quantum capacities of the depolarizing channel and the generalized amplitude damping channel are strictly better than previously best-known bounds for certain regimes.
This manuscript gathers and subsumes a long series of works on using QW to simulate transport phenomena. Quantum Walks (QWs) consist of single and isolated quantum systems, evolving in discrete or continuous time steps according to a causal, shift-invariant unitary evolution in discrete space. We start reminding some necessary fundamentals of linear algebra, including the definitions of Hilbert space, tensor state, the definition of linear operator and then we briefly present the principles of quantum mechanics on which this thesis is grounded. After having reviewed the literature of QWs and the main historical approaches to their study, we then move on to consider a new property of QWs, the plasticity. Plastic QWs are those ones admitting both continuous time-discrete space and continuous spacetime time limit. We show that such QWs can be used to quantum simulate a large class of physical phenomena described by transport equations. We investigate this new family of QWs in one and two spatial dimensions, showing that in two dimensions, the PDEs we can simulate are more general and include dispersive terms. We show that the above results do not need to rely on the grid and we prove that such QW-based quantum simulators can be defined on 2-complex simplicia, i.e. triangular lattices. Finally, we extend the above result to any arbitrary triangulation, proving that such QWs coincide in the continuous limit to a transport equation on a general curved surface, including the curved Dirac equation in 2+1 spacetime dimensions.
There have been several recent advancements in the field of long-distance point-to-point twin-field quantum key distribution (TFQKD) protocols, with an ultimate objective to build a large scalable quantum network for numerous users. Currently, fundamental limitations still exist for the implementation of a practical TFQKD network, including the strict constraint regarding intensity and probability for sending-or-not-sending type protocols and the low tolerance of large interference errors for phase-matching type protocols. Here, we propose a two-photon TFQKD protocol to overcome these issues simultaneously and introduce a cost-effective solution to construct a real TFQKD network, under which each node with fixed system parameters can dynamically switch different attenuation links while achieving good performance in long-distance transmission. For a four-user network, simulation results indicate that the key rates of our protocol for all six links can either exceed or approach the secret key capacity; however, four of them could not extract the key rate if using sending-or-not-sending type protocols. We anticipate that our proposed method can facilitate new practical and efficient TFQKD networks in the future.
All known constructions of classical or quantum commitments require at least one-way functions. Are one-way functions really necessary for commitments? In this paper, we show that non-interactive quantum commitments (for classical messages) with computational hiding and statistical binding exist if pseudorandom quantum states exist. Pseudorandom quantum states are sets of quantum states that are efficiently generated but computationally indistinguishable from Haar random states [Z. Ji, Y.-K. Liu, and F. Song, CRYPTO 2018]. It is known that pseudorandom quantum states exist even if BQP=QMA (relative to a quantum oracle) [W. Kretschmer, TQC 2021], which means that pseudorandom quantum states can exist even if no quantum-secure classical cryptographic primitive exists. Our result therefore shows that quantum commitments can exist even if no quantum-secure classical cryptographic primitive exists. In particular, quantum commitments can exist even if no quantum-secure one-way function exists. We also show that one-time secure signatures with quantum public keys exist if pseudorandom quantum states exist. In the classical setting, the existence of signatures is equivalent to the existence of one-way functions. Our result, on the other hand, suggests that quantum signatures can exist even if no quantum-secure classical cryptographic primitive (including quantum-secure one-way functions) exists.
Quantum network communication is challenging, as the No-cloning theorem in quantum regime makes many classical techniques inapplicable. For long-distance communication, the only viable communication approach is teleportation of quantum states, which requires a prior distribution of entangled pairs (EPs) of qubits. Establishment of EPs across remote nodes can incur significant latency due to the low probability of success of the underlying physical processes. The focus of our work is to develop efficient techniques that minimize EP generation latency. Prior works have focused on selecting entanglement paths; in contrast, we select entanglement swapping trees--a more accurate representation of the entanglement generation structure. We develop a dynamic programming algorithm to select an optimal swapping-tree for a single pair of nodes, under the given capacity and fidelity constraints. For the general setting, we develop an efficient iterative algorithm to compute a set of swapping trees. We present simulation results which show that our solutions outperform the prior approaches by an order of magnitude and are viable for long-distance entanglement generation.
We apply digitized Quantum Annealing (QA) and Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm (QAOA) to a paradigmatic task of supervised learning in artificial neural networks: the optimization of synaptic weights for the binary perceptron. At variance with the usual QAOA applications to MaxCut, or to quantum spin-chains ground state preparation, the classical Hamiltonian is characterized by highly non-local multi-spin interactions. Yet, we provide evidence for the existence of optimal smooth solutions for the QAOA parameters, which are transferable among typical instances of the same problem, and we prove numerically an enhanced performance of QAOA over traditional QA. We also investigate on the role of the QAOA optimization landscape geometry in this problem, showing that the detrimental effect of a gap-closing transition encountered in QA is also negatively affecting the performance of our implementation of QAOA.
We investigate an unsuspected connection between logical connectives with non-harmonious deduction rules, such as Prior's tonk, and quantum computing. We argue these connectives model the information-erasure, the non-reversibility, and the non-determinism that occur, among other places, in quantum measurement. We introduce a propositional logic with a logical connective sup that has non-harmonious deduction rules and also with two interstitial rules, and show that the proof language of this logic forms the core of a quantum programming language.
We show how to translate a subset of RISC-V machine code compiled from a subset of C to quadratic unconstrained binary optimization (QUBO) models that can be solved by a quantum annealing machine: given a bound $n$, there is input $I$ to a program $P$ such that $P$ runs into a given program state $E$ executing no more than $n$ machine instructions if and only if the QUBO model of $P$ for $n$ evaluates to 0 on $I$. Thus, with more qubits on the machine than variables in the QUBO model, quantum annealing the model reaches 0 (ground) energy in constant time with high probability on some input $I$ that is part of the ground state if and only if $P$ runs into $E$ on $I$ in no more than $n$ instructions. Translation takes $\mathcal{O}(n^2)$ time turning a quantum annealer into a polynomial-time symbolic execution engine and bounded model checker, eliminating their path and state explosion problems. Here, we take advantage of the fact that any machine instruction may only increase the size of the program state by $\mathcal{O}(w)$ bits where $w$ is machine word size. Translation time comes down to $\mathcal{O}(n)$ if memory consumption of $P$ is bounded by a constant, establishing a linear (quadratic) upper bound on quantum space, in number of qubits, in terms of algorithmic time (space) in classical computing. This result motivates a temporal and spatial metric of quantum advantage. Our prototypical open-source toolchain translates machine code that runs on real RISC-V hardware to models that can be solved by real quantum annealing hardware, as shown in our experiments.
Quantum candies (qandies) is a pedagogical simple model which describes many concepts from quantum information processing (QIP) intuitively, without the need to understand or make use of superpositions, and without the need of using complex algebra. One of the topics in quantum cryptography which gains research attention in recent years is quantum digital signatures (QDS), involving protocols to securely sign classical bits using quantum methods. In this paper we show how the "qandy model" can be used to describe three QDS protocols, in order to provide an important and potentially practical example of the power of "superpositionless" quantum information processing, for individuals without background knowledge in the field.
We show that Gottesman's semantics (GROUP22, 1998) for Clifford circuits based on the Heisenberg representation can be treated as a type system that can efficiently characterize a common subset of quantum programs. Our applications include (i) certifying whether auxiliary qubits can be safely disposed of, (ii) determining if a system is separable across a given bi-partition, (iii) checking the transversality of a gate with respect to a given stabilizer code, and (iv) typing post-measurement states for computational basis measurements. Further, this type system is extended to accommodate universal quantum computing by deriving types for the $T$-gate, multiply-controlled unitaries such as the Toffoli gate, and some gate injection circuits that use associated magic states. These types allow us to prove a lower bound on the number of $T$ gates necessary to perform a multiply-controlled $Z$ gate.
Sparse representation of real-life images is a very effective approach in imaging applications, such as denoising. In recent years, with the growth of computing power, data-driven strategies exploiting the redundancy within patches extracted from one or several images to increase sparsity have become more prominent. This paper presents a novel image denoising algorithm exploiting such an image-dependent basis inspired by the quantum many-body theory. Based on patch analysis, the similarity measures in a local image neighborhood are formalized through a term akin to interaction in quantum mechanics that can efficiently preserve the local structures of real images. The versatile nature of this adaptive basis extends the scope of its application to image-independent or image-dependent noise scenarios without any adjustment. We carry out a rigorous comparison with contemporary methods to demonstrate the denoising capability of the proposed algorithm regardless of the image characteristics, noise statistics and intensity. We illustrate the properties of the hyperparameters and their respective effects on the denoising performance, together with automated rules of selecting their values close to the optimal one in experimental setups with ground truth not available. Finally, we show the ability of our approach to deal with practical images denoising problems such as medical ultrasound image despeckling applications.