Abstract

We prove polarization theorems for arbitrary classical-quantum (cq) channels. The input alphabet is endowed with an arbitrary Abelian group operation, and an Anion-style transformation is applied using this operation. It is shown that as the number of polarization steps becomes large, the synthetic cq-channels polarize to deterministic homomorphism channels that project their input to a quotient group of the input alphabet. This result is used to construct polar codes for arbitrary cq-channels and arbitrary cq multiple access channels. The encoder can be implemented in O(N log N) operations, where N is the blocklength of the code. A quantum successive cancellation decoder for the constructed codes is proposed. It is shown that the probability of error of this decoder decays faster than 2(-N beta) for any beta < (1/2).

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