A Four-Round LOCC Protocol Outperforms All Two-Round Protocols in Reducing the Entanglement Cost for A Distributed Quantum Information Processing

Abstract: We prove that there is a trade-off relation between the entanglement cost and the number of rounds of communication, for two distant parties to accomplish a bidirectional quantum information task by local operations and classical communication (LOCC). We consider an implementation of a class of two-qubit controlled-unitary gate by LOCC assisted by shared entanglement, in an information theoretical scenario of asymptotically many input pairs and vanishingly small error. We prove the trade-off relation by showing that one ebit of entanglement per pair is necessary to be consumed for implementing the unitary by any two-round protocol, whereas the entanglement cost by a four-round protocol is strictly smaller than one ebit per pair.