English

Optimal pure state cloning and transposition are complementary channels

Quantum Physics 2026-03-30 v2

Abstract

State cloning and state transposition are fundamental transformations which, despite being desirable, cannot be perfectly realised due to two conceptually distinct constraints of quantum theory: cloning is forbidden by linearity, while transposition is ruled out by complete positivity. In this work, we show that, despite these different constraints, the best physically allowed realisation of both transformations arises from a single physical process described by an isometry, which simultaneously implements their best possible approximations. We first determine the optimal fidelity for transforming NN qudits into KK copies of their transposition and show that, for pure input states, it is achieved by an estimation strategy, which is the unique optimal strategy under the worst-case fidelity figure of merit. We further prove that the corresponding NKN \to K transposition map is the complementary channel of the optimal universal symmetric NN+KN \to N + K quantum cloning machine on pure states. We then present an explicit quantum circuit that realises NKN \to K transposition and NN+KN \to N + K cloning in parallel and analyse its gate efficiency. Finally, we investigate mixed-state N1N \to 1 qudit transposition and determine its maximal performance in terms of white-noise visibility, yielding the structural physical approximation of transposition in the multicopy regime.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.23628,
  title  = {Optimal pure state cloning and transposition are complementary channels},
  author = {Vanessa Brzić and Dmitry Grinko and Michał Studziński and Marco Túlio Quintino},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.23628},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

24 pages total (5 pages main text, 19 pages appendix), 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:36:11.060Z