Upper bounds on the error probabilities and asymptotic error exponents in quantum multiple state discrimination

摘要

We consider the multiple hypothesis testing problem for symmetric quantum state discrimination between r given states sigma(1), ..., sigma(r). By splitting up the overall test into multiple binary tests in various ways we obtain a number of upper bounds on the optimal error probability in terms of the binary error probabilities. These upper bounds allow us to deduce various bounds on the asymptotic error rate, for which it has been hypothesized that it is given by the multi-hypothesis quantum Chernoff bound (or Chernoff divergence) C(sigma(1), ..., sigma(r)), as recently introduced by Nussbaum and Szkola in analogy with Salikhov's classical multi-hypothesis Chernoff bound. This quantity is defined as the minimum of the pairwise binary Chernoff divergences min(j