English

Retrocausal capacity of a quantum channel

Quantum Physics 2026-04-17 v2 Information Theory math.IT

Abstract

We study the capacity of a quantum channel for retrocausal communication, where messages are transmitted backward in time, from a sender in the future to a receiver in the past, through a noisy postselected closed timelike curve (P-CTC) mathematically represented by the channel. We completely characterize the one-shot retrocausal quantum and classical capacities, and we show that the corresponding asymptotic capacities are equal to the average and sum, respectively, of the channel's max-information and its regularized Doeblin information. This endows these information measures with a novel operational interpretation. Furthermore, our characterization can be generalized beyond quantum channels to all completely positive maps. This imposes information-theoretic limits on transmitting messages via postselected-teleportation-like mechanisms with arbitrary initial- and final-state boundary conditions, including those considered in various black-hole final-state models.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.08965,
  title  = {Retrocausal capacity of a quantum channel},
  author = {Kaiyuan Ji and Seth Lloyd and Mark M. Wilde},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.08965},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

7+31 pages, 4+10 figures