One of the lesser known cornerstones of modern physics is Claude Shannon’s mathematical theory of communication which he published in 1948 while juggling and unicycling his way around Bell Labs.

Shannon’s theory concerns how a message created at one point in space can be reproduced at another point in space. He calls the conduit for such a process a channel and the limits imposed by the universe on this process the channel capacity.

The capacity of a communications channel is hugely important idea. It tells you, among other things, the rate at which you can send information from one location to another, without loss. If you’ve ever made a phone call, watched television or surfed the internet you’ll have benefited from the work associated with this idea.

In recent years, our ideas about communication have been transformed by the possibility of using quantum particles to carry information. When that happens the strange rules of quantum mechanics govern what can and cannot be sent from one region of space to another. This kind of thinking has has spawned the entirely new fields of quantum communication and quantum computing.

But ask a physicist what the capacity is of a quantum information channel and she’ll stare at the floor and shuffle her feet. Despite years of trying, nobody has been able to update Shannon’s theory of communication with a quantum version.

Which is why a paper today on the arXiv is so exciting. Graeme Smith at the IBM Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights NY (a lab that has carried the torch for this problem) and Jon Yard from Los Alamos National Labs have made what looks to be an important breakthrough by calculating that two zero-capacity quantum channels can have a nonzero capacity when used together.

That’s interesting because it indicates that physicists may have been barking up the wrong tree with this problem: perhaps the quantum capacity of a channel does not uniquely specify its ability for transmitting quantum information. And if not, what else is relevant?

That’s going to be a stepping stone to some interesting new thinking in the coming months and years. Betcha!

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0807.4935: Quantum Communication With Zero-Capacity Channels