Classical capacity of Gaussian communication under a single noisy channel

TL;DR

This paper investigates the maximum achievable capacity of Gaussian communication over a single noisy channel, revealing that different protocols are optimal depending on energy levels and channel characteristics, with practical implications.

Contribution

It identifies the optimal Gaussian communication protocol for finite channel use, showing squeezed states are best at low energy and coherent states at high energy.

Findings

Squeezed-state communication is optimal at low photon numbers.

Coherent-state communication outperforms at high photon numbers.

The ultimate capacity can be approached with infinite channels, but practical limits vary.

Abstract

A long-standing problem on the classical capacity of bosonic Gaussian channels has recently been resolved by proving the minimum output entropy conjecture. It is also known that the ultimate capacity quantified by the Holevo bound can be achieved asymptotically by using an infinite number of channels. However, it is less understood to what extent the communication capacity can be reached if one uses a finite number of channels, which is a topic of practical importance. In this paper, we study the capacity of Gaussian communication, i.e., employing Gaussian states and Gaussian measurements to encode and decode information under a single-channel use. We prove that the optimal capacity of single-channel Gaussian communication is achieved by one of two well-known protocols, i.e., coherent-state communication or squeezed-state communication, depending on the energy (number of photons) as well as the characteristics of the channel. Our result suggests that the coherent-state scheme known to achieve the ultimate information-theoretic capacity is not a practically optimal scheme for the case of using a finite number of channels. We find that overall the squeezed-state communication is optimal in a small-photon-number regime whereas the coherent-state communication performs better in a large-photon-number regime.