Interactive Quantum Information Theory

          @misc{ pirsa_PIRSA:14110183,
            doi = {10.48660/14110183},
            url = {https://pirsa.org/14110183},
            author = {Touchette, Dave},
            keywords = {Quantum Foundations, Quantum Information},
            language = {en},
            title = {Interactive Quantum Information Theory},
            publisher = {Perimeter Institute},
            year = {2014},
            month = {nov},
            note = {PIRSA:14110183 see, \url{https://pirsa.org}}
          }
          

Abstract

In unidirectional communication theory, two of the most prominent problems are those of compressing a source of information and of transmitting data noiselessly over a noisy channel. In 1948, Shannon introduced information theory as a tool to address both of these problems. Since then, information theory has flourished into an important field of its own. It has also been successfully extended to the quantum setting, where it has also served to address questions about quantum source compression and transmission of classical and quantum data over noisy quantum channels.

However, in interactive communication theory, more specifically communication complexity, it is much more recently that tools from information theory have been successfully applied. Indeed, the interactive nature of communication protocols in this setting imposes new constraints and tools specific to this setting need to be developed, both for the interactive analogue of source compression and that of coding for noisy channels. The exciting field of classical interactive information theory has been very active in recent years.

We discuss recent works for its quantum counterpart. In particular, we discuss joint work showing that a constant factor overhead is sufficient for robustly implementing interactive quantum communication over noisy channels [1]. We also discuss work introducing a new notion of quantum information complexity that exactly captures the amortized cost per copy for implementing many copies of a communication task in parallel, such that compressing to this information complexity leads to a bounded-round direct sum theorem [2].

For both of these, we further discuss many interesting potential research directions that follow.

[1] joint work with Gilles Brassard, Ashwin Nayak, Alain Tapp, Falk Unger, QIP’14, FOCS’14 [2] Merge of arXiv:1404.3733 and arXiv:1409.4391, to appear at QIP’15