Universal Improvement of Channel Fidelity via Entanglement Assistance

Communication using quantum channels generally requires encoding and decoding on many identical uses of a quantum channel. In practical settings, decoherence may severely limit our ability to do so, potentially rendering each channel use nonidentical. Given n nonidentical channels, we present an entanglement-assisted encoding and decoding strategy that yields a channel with higher worst-case fidelity than all of the n given channels. The strategy is universal, in the sense that the improvement holds regardless of what channels are given, as long as they satisfy mild assumptions on their initial entanglement fidelities. Our protocol is optimal when the given channels are depolarizing channels, and is essentially the unique one that is universal. This idea can also be extended to classical channels, where shared randomness between the sender and the receiver allows universal enhancement of the probability of correct transmission. We then consider general quantum resource theories, providing a necessary condition and a sufficient condition for the possibility of such universal improvement of quantum resources.