Optimal asymptotic cloning machines

Abstract: We pose the question whether the asymptotic equivalence between quantum cloning and quantum state estimation, valid at the single-clone level, still holds when all clones are examined globally. We conjecture that the answer is affirmative and present a large amount of evidence supporting our conjecture, developing techniques to derive optimal asymptotic cloners and proving their equivalence with estimation in virtually all scenarios considered in the literature. Our analysis covers the case of arbitrary finite sets of states, arbitrary families of coherent states, arbitrary phase- and multiphase-covariant sets of states, and two-qubit maximally entangled states. In all these examples we observe that the optimal asymptotic fidelity enjoys a universality property, as its scaling does not depend on the specific details of the set of input states, but only on the number of parameters needed to specify them.