Tomamichel, Marco

Date: Tuesday September 16, 2014
Time: 15:00
Place: ETH Zurich, Hönggerberg, HIT K51
Host: Volkher Scholz

How much information can we reliably send through a realistic quantum channel?

Marco Tomamichel
University of Sydney, Australia

Classical and quantum information theory often concerns itself with asymptotic limits that are not so relevant in practice. For example, the capacity of a channel is the answer to the question of how much information one can send through asymptotically many uses of a channel with vanishing error. However, large quantum systems are notoriously hard to control and there will be severe limitations on the size of quantum computers for the foreseeable future. Thus, it is important to understand the behavior of channels when only finite resources are available and a small probability of failure is permissible. I will discuss recent progress on this question, concerning the capacity of a quantum channel to transmit classical as well as quantum information. (This is joint work with Vincent Y. F. Tan, Mark M. Wilde and Andreas Winter.)