Private communication via zero-private-capacity quantum channels

Abstract: Private communication over a noisy quantum channel requires reliable transmission to the receiver and secrecy from the environment. Whether two channels with zero private capacity can jointly enable private communication is a longstanding open problem in quantum information theory. Here we resolve this problem by exhibiting a four-level channel and a qubit erasure channel with half erasure probability, each with zero private capacity, whose joint use achieves more than 0.0001903 private bits per product use. The encoding gives the receiver a linear information gain with at most quadratic environmental leakage, enabling privacy through a fixed joint measurement and classical coding. This superactivation, impossible for independent classical memoryless wiretap channels, shows that a channel's private capacity alone does not determine its value for secure communication. The initial activation example was identified through interactions with LLMs, and the result has been formalized in Lean 4.