Fully quantum source compression with a quantum helper

© 2015 IEEE. We study source compression with a helper in the fully quantum regime, extending our earlier result on classical source compression with a quantum helper [arXiv:1501.04366, 2015]. We characterise the quantum resources involved in this problem, and derive a single-letter expression of the achievable rate region when entanglement assistance is available. The direct coding proof is based on a combination of two fundamental protocols, namely the quantum state merging protocol and the quantum reverse Shannon theorem (QRST). This result connects distributed source compression with the QRST protocol, a quantum protocol that consumes noiseless resources to simulate a noisy quantum channel.