Perfect discrimination of non-orthogonal quantum states with posterior classical partial information

Abstract: The indistinguishability of non-orthogonal pure states lies at the heart of quantum information processing. Although the indistinguishability reflects the impossibility of measuring complementary physical quantities by a single measurement, we demonstrate that the distinguishability can be perfectly retrieved simply with the help of posterior classical partial information. We demonstrate this by showing an ensemble of non-orthogonal pure states such that a state randomly sampled from the ensemble can be perfectly identified by a single measurement with help of the post-processing of the measurement outcomes and additional partial information about the sampled state, i.e., the label of subensemble from which the state is sampled. When an ensemble consists of two subensembles, we show that the perfect distinguishability of the ensemble with the help of the post-processing can be restated as a matrix-decomposition problem. Furthermore, we give the analytical solution for the problem when both subensembles consist of two states.