On entanglement assistance to a noiseless classical channel

Abstract

For a classical channel, neither the Shannon ca-pa-city, nor the sum of conditional probabilities corresponding to the cases of successful transmission can be increased by the use of shared entanglement, or, more generally, a non-signaling resource. Yet, perhaps somewhat counterintuitively, entanglement assistance can help and actually elevate the chances of success even in a one-way communicational task that is to be completed by a single-shot use of a noiseless classical channel. To quantify the help that a non-signaling resource provides to a noiseless classical channel, one might ask how many extra letters should be added to the alphabet of the channel in order to perform equally well $without$ the specified non-signaling resource. As was observed by Cubitt, Leung, Matthews, and Winter, there is no upper bound on the number of extra letters required for substituting the assistance of a general non-signaling resource to a noiseless one-bit classical channel. In contrast, here we prove that if this resource is a bipartite quantum system in a maximally entangled state, then an extra classical bit always suffices as a replacement.