Capacity of quantum erasure channel assisted by backwards classical communication

Debbie Leung, Joungkeun Lim, and Peter Shor

Accepted Monday May 19, 2008

We present a communication protocol for the erasure channel assisted by backward classical communication, which achieves a significantly better rate than the best prior result. In addition, we prove an upper bound for the capacity of the channel. The upper bound is smaller than the capacity of the erasure channel when it is assisted by two-way classical communication. Thus, we prove the separation between quantum capacities assisted by backward classical communication and two-way classical communication.