On communication over an entanglement-assisted quantum channel

Shared entanglement is a resource available to parties communicating over a quantum channel, much akin to public coins in classical communication protocols. Whereas shared randomness does not help in the transmission of information, or significantly reduce the classical complexity of computing functions (as compared to private-coin protocols), shared entanglement leads to startling phenomena such as ``quantum teleportation'' and ``superdense coding.'' The problem of characterising the power of prior entanglement has puzzled many researchers. In this paper, we revisit the problem of transmitting classical bits over an entanglement-assisted quantum channel. We derive a new, optimal bound on the number of quantum bits required for this task, for any given probability of error. All known lower bounds in the setting of bounded error entanglement-assisted communication are based on sophisticated information theoretic arguments. In contrast, our result is derived from first principles, using a simple linear algebraic technique.