On communication over an entanglement-assisted quantum channel

Abstract

Shared entanglement is a resource available to parties communicating over a quantum channel, much akin to public coins in classical communication protocols: the two parties may be given some number of quantum bits jointly prepared in a fixed superposition, prior to communicating with each other. The quantum channel is then said to be "entanglement-assisted." Shared randomness does not help in the transmission of information from one party to another. Moreover, it does not significantly reduce the classical complexity of computing functions vis-a-vis private-coin protocols. On the other hand, prior entanglement leads to startling phenomena such as "quantum teleportation" and "superdense coding." The problem of characterising the power of prior entanglement has baffled many researchers, especially in the setting of bounded-error protocols. It is open whether it leads to more than a factor of two savings (using superdense coding) or more than an additive O(log) savings (when used to create shared randomness). Few lower bounds are known for communication problems in this setting, and are all derived using sophisticated information theoretic techniques. In this paper, we focus on the most basic problem in the setting of communication over an entanglement-assisted quantum channel, that of communicating classical bits from one party to another. We derive optimal bounds on the number of quantum bits required for this task, for any given probability of error.