How well can you know the edge of a quantum pyramid?

Abstract

We consider a symmetric quantum communication scenario in which the signal states are edges of a quantum pyramid of arbitrary dimension and arbitrary shape, and all edge states are transmitted with the same probability. The receiver could employ different decoding strategies: he could minimize the error probability, or discriminate without ambiguity, or extract the accessible information. We state the optimal measurement scheme for each strategy. For large parameter ranges, the standard square-root measurement does not extract the information optimally.

13 pages, 5 figures, 1 table