Exploring super-additivity of coherent information of noisy quantum channels through Genetic algorithms

Abstract: Machine learning techniques are increasingly being used in fundamental research to solve various challenging problems. Here we explore one such technique to address an important problem in quantum communication scenario. While transferring quantum information through a noisy quantum channel, the utility of the channel is characterized by its quantum capacity. Quantum channels, however, display an intriguing property called super-additivity of coherent information. This makes the calculation of quantum capacity a hard computational problem involving optimization over an exponentially increasing search space. In this work, we first utilize a neural network ansatz to represent quantum states and then apply an evolutionary optimization scheme to address this problem. We find regions in the three-parameter space of qubit Pauli channels where coherent information exhibits this super-additivity feature. We characterised the quantum codes that achieves high coherent information, finding several non-trivial quantum codes that outperforms the repetition codes for some Pauli channels. For some Pauli channels, these codes displays very high super-additivity of the order of 0.01, much higher than the observed values in other well studied quantum channels. We further compared the learning performance of the Neural Network ansatz with the raw ansatz to find that in the three-shot case, the neural network ansatz outperforms the raw representation in finding quantum codes of high coherent information. We also compared the learning performance of the evolutionary algorithm with a simple Particle Swarm Optimisation scheme and show empirical results indicating comparable performance, suggesting that the Neural Network ansatz coupled with the evolutionary scheme is indeed a promising approach to finding non-trivial quantum codes of high coherent information.