Contextuality-enhanced quantum state discrimination under fixed failure probability
Quantum state discrimination enables the accurate identification of quantum states, which are generally nonorthogonal. Among various strategies, minimum-error discrimination and unambiguous state discrimination exhibit contextuality-enhanced success probabilities that surpass classical bounds, offering significant advantages for quantum sensing and communication. However, in practice, both error and failure outcomes can occur, suggesting the need for a unified strategy that incorporates both aspects while exploring the potential for contextuality enhancement. In this work, we theoretically demonstrate contextuality enhancement in quantum state discrimination under a fixed failure probability. We show that this enhancement disappears within a certain intermediate range of failure probabilities--a phenomenon absent in conventional strategies, where both minimum-error and unambiguous discrimination consistently outperform the noncontextual bound for equal priors. Moreover, we analyze how the existence of this non-enhancement region depends on the confusability of the quantum states, which corresponds to their fidelity in a quantum model. We further extend the discussion to the noisy state discrimination, which even encompasses the maximal-confidence discrimination. In this extended discussion, we observe that the non-enhancement region tends to disappear with increasing noise strength.
Authors
- Hyang‐Tag Lim (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4068-2902)
- Anonymous
Institutions
- Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KR)
- Korea University of Science and Technology (KR)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Physical review. A/Physical review, A
- Published
- 2026-02-04
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1103/zx3b-y3fc
- Primary Topic
- Quantum Mechanics and Applications
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00