Asymptotic Quantum State Discrimination for Mixtures of Unitarily Related States

Abstract

Given a mixture of states, finding a way to optimally discriminate its elements is a prominent problem in quantum communication theory. In this paper, we will address mixtures of density operators that are unitarily equivalent via elements of a one-parameter unitary group, and the corresponding quantum state discrimination (QSD) problems. We will be particularly interested in QSD as time goes to infinity. We first present an approach to QSD in the case of countable mixtures and address the respective asymptotic QSD optimization problems, proving necessary and sufficient conditions for minimal error to be obtained in the asymptotic regime (we say that in such a case QSD is fully solvable). We then outline an analogous approach to uncountable mixtures, presenting some conjectures that mirror the results presented for the cases of countable mixtures. As a technical tool, we prove and use an infinite dimensional version of the well-known Barnum-Knill bound.