Simple Communication Complexity Separation from Quantum State Antidistinguishability

Abstract

A set of $n$ pure quantum states is called antidististinguishable if there exists an $n$-outcome measurement that never outputs the outcome `$k$' on the $k$-th quantum state. We describe sets of quantum states for which any subset of three states is antidistinguishable and use this to produce a two-player communication task that can be solved with $\log d$ qubits, but requires one-way communication of at least $\log (4/3) (d-1) - 1 \approx 0.415 (d-1) - 1$ classical bits. The advantages of the approach are that the proof is simple and self-contained -- not needing, for example, to rely on hard-to-establish prior results in combinatorics -- and that with slight modifications, non-trivial bounds can be established in any dimension $\geq 3$. The task can be framed in terms of the separated parties solving a relation, and the separation is also robust to multiplicative error in the output probabilities. We show, however, that for this particular task, the separation disappears if two-way classical communication is allowed. Finally, we state a conjecture regarding antidistinguishability of sets of states, and provide some supporting numerical evidence. If the conjecture holds, then there is a two-player communication task that can be solved with $\log d$ qubits, but requires one-way communication of $\Omega (d \log d)$ classical bits.