We give a simple, direct proof of the 'mother' protocol of quantum information theory. In this new formulation, it is easy to see that the mother, or rather her generalization to the fully quantum Slepian-Wolf protocol, simultaneously accomplishes two goals: quantum communication-assisted entanglement distillation and state transfer from the sender to the receiver. As a result, in addition to her other 'children', the mother protocol generates the state-merging primitive of Horodecki, Oppenheim and Winter, a fully quantum reverse Shannon theorem, and a new class of distributed compression protocols for correlated quantum sources which are optimal for sources described by separable density operators. Moreover, the mother protocol described here is easily transformed into the so-called 'father' protocol whose children provide the quantum capacity and the entanglement-assisted capacity of a quantum channel, demonstrating that the division of single-sender/single-receiver protocols into two families was unnecessary: all protocols in the family are children of the mother.

The Markov Chain Monte Carlo method is at the heart of efficient approximation schemes for a wide range of problems in combinatorial enumeration and statistical physics. It is therefore very natural and important to determine whether quantum computers can speed-up classical mixing processes based on Markov chains. To this end, we present a new quantum algorithm, making it possible to prepare a quantum sample, i.e., a coherent version of the stationary distribution of a reversible Markov chain. Our algorithm has a significantly better running time than that of a previous algorithm based on adiabatic state generation. We also show that our methods provide a speed-up over a recently proposed method for obtaining ground states of (classical) Hamiltonians.

We achieve a quantum speed-up of fully polynomial randomized approximation schemes (FPRAS) for estimating partition functions that combine simulated annealing with the Monte-Carlo Markov Chain method and use non-adaptive cooling schedules. The improvement in time complexity is twofold: a quadratic reduction with respect to the spectral gap of the underlying Markov chains and a quadratic reduction with respect to the parameter characterizing the desired accuracy of the estimate output by the FPRAS. Both reductions are intimately related and cannot be achieved separately.First, we use Grover's fixed point search, quantum walks and phase estimation to efficiently prepare approximate coherent encodings of stationary distributions of the Markov chains. The speed-up we obtain in this way is due to the quadratic relation between the spectral and phase gaps of classical and quantum walks. Second, we generalize the method of quantum counting, showing how to estimate expected values of quantum observables. Using this method instead of classical sampling, we obtain the speed-up with respect to accuracy.

Abstract-In this paper, we present a one-shot method for preparing pure entangled states between a sender and a receiver at a minimal cost of entanglement and quantum communication. In the case of preparing unentangled states, an earlier paper showed that a 2 -qubit quantum state could be communicated to a receiver by physically transmitting only + ( ) qubits in addition to consuming ebits of entanglement and some shared randomness. When the states to be prepared are entangled, we find that there is a reduction in the number of qubits that need to be transmitted, interpolating between no communication at all for maximally entangled states and the earlier two-for-one result of the unentangled case, all without the use of any shared randomness. We also present two applications of our result: a direct proof of the achievability of the optimal superdense coding protocol for entangled states produced by a memoryless source, and a demonstration that the quantum identification capacity of an ebit is two qubits.