Multipartite entanglement to boost superadditivity of coherent information in quantum communication lines with polarization dependent losses

Abstract

Coherent information quantifies the achievable rate of the reliable quantum information transmission through a communication channel. Use of the correlated quantum states instead of the factorized ones may result in an increase in the coherent information, a phenomenon known as superadditivity. However, even for simple physical models of channels it is rather difficult to detect the superadditivity and find the advantageous multipartite states. Here we consider the case of polarization dependent losses and propose some physically motivated multipartite entangled states which outperform all factorized states in a wide range of the channel parameters. We show that in the asymptotic limit of the infinite number of channel uses the superadditivity phenomenon takes place whenever the channel is neither degradable nor antidegradable. Besides the superadditivity identification, we also provide a method how to modify the proposed states and get a higher quantum communication rate by doubling the number of channel uses. The obtained results give a deeper understanding of coherent information in the multishot scenario and may serve as a benchmark for quantum capacity estimations and future approaches toward an optimal strategy to transfer quantum information.