English

Contextuality-enhanced quantum state discrimination under fixed failure probability

Quantum Physics 2026-02-24 v1

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2602.19397,
  title  = {Contextuality-enhanced quantum state discrimination under fixed failure probability},
  author = {Min Namkung and Hyang-Tag Lim},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.19397},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

12 pages, 4 figures

R2 v1 2026-07-01T10:46:39.846Z