Epistemic view of quantum states and communication complexity of quantum channels

Abstract

The communication complexity of a quantum channel is the minimal amount of classical communication required for classically simulating a process of state preparation, transmission through the channel and subsequent measurement. It establishes a limit on the power of quantum communication in terms of classical resources. We show that classical simulations employing a finite amount of communication can be derived from a special class of hidden variable theories where quantum states represent statistical knowledge about the classical state and not an element of reality. This special class has attracted strong interest very recently. The communication cost of each derived simulation is given by the mutual information between the quantum state and the classical state of the parent hidden variable theory. Finally, we find that the communication complexity for single qubits is smaller than 1.28 bits. The previous known upper bound was 1.85 bits.

References in corpus (5)

• The Communication Cost of Simulating Bell Correlations
• Implications of the Pusey-Barrett-Rudolph quantum no-go theorem
• Exponential complexity and ontological theories of quantum mechanics
• State space dimensionality in short memory hidden variable theories
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Cited by in corpus (7)

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• Failure of epistemic models to explain the antidistinguishability of quantum mixed preparations
• Quantum Entanglement in Time