Compression for quantum population coding

Abstract

We study the compression of arbitrary parametric families of n identically prepared finite-dimensional quantum states, in a setting that can be regarded as a quantum analogue of population coding. For a family with f free parameters, we propose an asymptotically faithful protocol that requires a memory of overall size (f/2) log n. Our construction uses a quantum version of local asymptotic normality and, as an intermediate step, solves the problem of the optimal compression of n identically prepared displaced thermal states. Our protocol achieves the ultimate bound predicted by quantum Shannon theory. In addition, we explore the minimum requirement for quantum memory: On the one hand, the amount of quantum memory used by our protocol can be made arbitrarily small compared to the overall memory cost; on the other hand, any protocol using only classical memory cannot be faithful.