Second-Order Asymptotics of Visible Mixed Quantum Source Coding via Universal Codes

Abstract

The simplest example of a quantum information source with memory is a mixed source, which emits signals entirely from one of two memoryless quantum sources with given $\textit{a priori}$ probabilities. Considering a mixed source consisting of a general one-parameter family of memoryless sources, we derive the second-order asymptotic rate for fixed-length visible source coding. Furthermore, we specialize our main result to a mixed source consisting of two memoryless sources. Our results provide the first example of the second-order asymptotics for a quantum information-processing task employing a resource with memory. For the case of a classical mixed source (using a finite alphabet), our results reduce to those obtained by Nomura and Han. To prove the achievability part of our main result, we introduce universal quantum source codes achieving the second-order asymptotic rates. These are obtained by an extension of Hayashi’s construction of their classical counterparts.