The Petz recovery map for optical losses

Optical systems are a main platform for quantum information processing. A main challenge is information loss due to scattering in unmonitored modes. These losses are modeled as state-independent beam-splitter interactions, with a thermal state (for all practical purposes, the vacuum) in the second input port. The perfect correction of these Gaussian lossy channels with Gaussian operations alone is known to be impossible. In this work, we investigate the Petz recovery map as an approximate recovery. For single mode losses and Gaussian reference states, the Petz map is found to use either a beam-splitter or a state-independent amplifier, depending on the parameters. Then we study the recovery performance on several examples, showing that it is near-optimal among the considered class of protocols. We also obtain more specific comparisons: Petz is always better than just re-preparing the reference state; but it is worse than doing nothing if the reference state is far from the true state. Finally, we extend our study to losses on two modes, and compare the global Petz map to the local implementation on each mode separately.