Quantum capacity under adversarial quantum noise: arbitrarily varying quantum channels (Q1936645)

The authors investigate entanglement transmission over arbitrarily varying quantum channel (AVQC). Such transmission involves an unknown channel in the presence of a third party (the adversary) which may choose a memoryless but nonstationary channel without informing the legitimate sender and receiver about the particular choice made. A quantum version of Ahlswede's dichotomy for classical arbitrarily varing channels is derived and it is proved that the capacity for entanglement transmission of an AVQC always equals its strong subspace transmission capacity, a result which is in contrast to the classical case. As an application the authors calculate the quantum capacity of finite AVQC consisting of quantum erasure channels.