The broadcast quantum channel for classical information transmission

Abstract

It is well known that quantum theory forbids the exact copying of an unknown quantum state. Therefore in broadcasting of classical information by a quantum channel an additional contribution to the error in the decoding is expected. We consider the optimal copying transformation which is adapted to classical information transmission by two linearly independent quantum states, and show that there is no additional contribution to the error. Instead the clones are correlated, and this breaks their usefulness: The entanglement increases with non-orthogonality of the states. The capacity of the corresponding quantum channel is considered also.