Energy-constrained two-way capacities of the pure-loss bosonic channel

We determine the two-way quantum, entanglement-distribution, private, and secret-key capacities of the pure-loss bosonic channel under an unconditional mean transmitted-photon-number constraint. For transmissivity $η$ and mean photon number $N$, all four capacities coincide and are given by $g(N)-g((1-η)N)$, where $g$ is the entropy of a thermal mode. This resolves the longstanding finite-energy capacity problem by establishing the optimality of the reverse-coherent-information rate introduced in 2009. Our central tool is sector teleportation simulation, which we develop specifically to transfer the input-energy constraint to the shared entanglement resource, thereby preserving the constraint throughout converse arguments for general adaptive protocols. For every $N>0$, we further show that the corresponding strong-converse thresholds coincide with the unconstrained value $-\log_2(1-η)$. For parallel protocols with a hard total-photon-number cutoff, the same finite-energy capacity formula instead satisfies an exponential strong converse. Together, these results establish a unified finite-energy framework for adaptive bosonic communication and reveal how energy constraints fundamentally reshape both attainable rates and converse bounds.

Source: arXiv:2610.06832v1 - http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06832v1 PDF: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.06832v1 Original Link: http://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06832v1