Asymptotically optimal purification of noisy unitary channels in any dimension

Abstract

We consider the problem of noisy unitary purification. Given access to an unknown $d$-dimensional unitary channel followed by depolarizing noise of strength $p$, we aim to construct a superchannel that universally purifies the noisy unitary back to the original unknown unitary. We optimize over arbitrary adaptive sequential strategies and analytically derive the optimal fidelity to the leading order in the noise strength and number of channel uses, while also providing a concrete $\mathrm{SU}(d)$-covariant parallel strategy that attains the optimum. Our result implies the query complexity $Θ(d^2p/ε)$ for achieving leading-order infidelity $ε$ in the low-noise regime, which scales better than the naive approach combining optimal state purification and storage-and-retrieval of quantum channels. We also consider the dual problem of noisy unitary conjugation, where the goal is to obtain the best approximation of the complex conjugate of the original unknown unitary from access to noisy queries. We show that the optimal fidelity for this task coincides with that of noisy unitary purification to the leading-order in the low-noise and large-query limit.