Ge Bai

A mixed quantum state can be taken as describing the lack of knowledge about the true pure state of the system ("proper mixture"); or as arising from entanglement with another system that has been disregarded ("improper mixture"). We demonstrate that proper and improper mixtures, while indistinguishable for prediction, constitute distinct priors yielding inequivalent retrodictive updates. We introduce extended retrodiction to capture these latent correlations. This framework resolves the conflict in quantum smoothing, unifying the Guevara-Wiseman and Petz-Fuchs approaches as special cases of extended priors, and establishes their entropic relation.

Transformations of quantum channels, such as the transpose, complex conjugate, and adjoint, are fundamental to quantum information theory. Given access to an unknown channel, a central problem is whether these transformations can be implemented physically with quantum supermaps. While such supermaps are known for unitary operations, the situation for general quantum channels is fundamentally different. In this work, we establish a strict hierarchy of physical realizability for the transposition, complex conjugation, and adjoint transformation of an unknown quantum channel. We present a probabilistic protocol that exactly implements the transpose with a single query. In contrast, we prove no-go theorems showing that neither the complex conjugate nor the adjoint can be implemented by any completely positive supermap, even probabilistically. We then overcome this impossibility by designing a virtual protocol for the complex conjugate based on quasi-probability decomposition, and show its optimality in terms of the diamond norm. As a key application, we propose a protocol to estimate the expectation values resulting from the Petz recovery map of an unknown channel, achieving an improved query complexity compared to existing methods.

Continuous-variable quantum information, encoded into in finite-dimensional quantum systems, is a promising platform for the realization of many quantum information protocols, including quantum computation, quantum metrology, quantum cryptography, and quantum communication. To successfully demonstrate these protocols, an essential step is the certi fication of multimode continuous variable quantum states and quantum devices. This problem is well studied under the assumption that multiple uses of the same device result into identical and independently distributed (i.i.d.) operations. However, in realistic scenarios, identical and independent state preparation and calls to the quantum devices cannot be generally guaranteed. Important instances include adversarial scenarios and instances of time-dependent and correlated noise. In this paper, we propose the first set of reliable protocols for verifying multimode continuous-variable entangled states and devices in these non-i.i.d scenarios.