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Retrocausal capacity of a quantum channel

Published: September 10, 2025 | arXiv ID: 2509.08965v1

By: Kaiyuan Ji, Seth Lloyd, Mark M. Wilde

Potential Business Impact:

Lets messages travel back in time.

Business Areas:
Telecommunications Hardware

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) represented by the channel. We completely characterize the one-shot retrocausal quantum and classical capacities of a quantum channel, 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.

Page Count
38 pages

Category
Physics:
Quantum Physics