Quantum random access codes and incompatibility of measurements

Abstract

It is one of the peculiar features of quantum physics that some sets of measurements are incompatible in the sense that they cannot be performed simultaneously. Incompatibility is an important quantum resource as it enables Bell nonlocality and steering. Here we show that incompatibility is crucial also in certain communication tasks; we prove that quantum random access code performs better than its classical counterpart only when incompatible quantum measurements are used in the decoding task. As a consequence, evaluating the average success probability for quantum random access code provides a semi-device-independent test for the detection of quantum incompatibility. We further demonstrate that any incompatible pair of projective measurements gives an advantage over all classical strategies. Finally, we establish a connection between the maximal average success probability for quantum random access code and earlier quantities introduced to assess incompatibility.