Quantum inputs in the prepare-and-measure scenario and stochastic teleportation

Abstract We investigate prepare-and-measure scenarios in which a sender and a receiver use entanglement to send quantum information over a channel with limited capacity. We formalise this framework, identify its basic properties and provide numerical tools for optimising quantum protocols for generic communication tasks. The seminal protocol for sending quantum information over a classical channel is teleportation. We study a natural stochastic generalisation in which the sender holds N qubits from which the receiver can recover one on demand. We show that, if the classical communication is allowed to exploit extremal non-signalling correlations, then two bits of communication suffice to solve this task exactly for any N . We then consider entanglement-based protocols and show that these can be constructed systematically by leveraging connections to several well-known quantum information primitives, such as teleportation, cloning machines and random access coding. In particular, we show that by using genuine multi-particle entangled measurements, one can construct a universal stochastic teleportation machine, i.e. a device whose teleportation fidelity is independent of the quantum input.