Entanglement in channel discrimination with restricted measurements

TL;DR

This paper investigates the effectiveness of LOCC measurements in quantum channel discrimination, revealing scenarios where entanglement either enhances or does not improve discrimination performance.

Contribution

It demonstrates the existence of channel discrimination problems where LOCC-based strategies are either optimal or no better than unentangled strategies, highlighting the nuanced role of entanglement.

Findings

LOCC measurements can be optimal for certain channel discrimination tasks.

Entanglement can be either advantageous or irrelevant in LOCC-based discrimination.

Some problems show LOCC strategies matching the best possible performance, while others do not benefit from entanglement.

Abstract

We study the power of measurements implementable with local quantum operations and classical communication (or LOCC measurements for short) in the setting of quantum channel discrimination. More precisely, we consider discrimination procedures that attempt to identify an unknown channel, chosen uniformly from two known alternatives, that take the following form: (i) the input to the unknown channel is prepared in a possibly entangled state with an ancillary system, (ii) the unknown channel is applied to the input system, and (iii) an LOCC measurement is performed on the output and ancillary systems, resulting in a guess for which of the two channels was given. The restriction of the measurement in such a procedure to be an LOCC measurement is of interest because it isolates the entanglement in the initial input/ancillary systems as a resource in the setting of channel discrimination. We prove that there exist channel discrimination problems for which restricted procedures of this sort can be at either of the two extremes: they may be optimal within the set of all discrimination procedures (and simultaneously outperform all strategies that make no use of entanglement), or they may be no better than unentangled strategies (and simultaneously sub-optimal within the set of all discrimination procedures).