Classical codes violate the conjectured square-root bound for quantum random access codes
This resolves an open conjecture in quantum information theory, showing that the bound does not hold for all QRACs, and identifies classical coding rate as the source of the separation.
The authors disprove a conjectured square-root bound for quantum random access codes by constructing classical random access codes with private randomness that violate it, achieving violations for any success probability above 1/2 at sufficiently large input lengths.
We consider whether every quantum random access code (QRAC) with density-operator encodings and arbitrary decoding measurements obeys the conjectured bound $p\leq(1+\sqrt{m/n})/2$, where $n$ classical bits are encoded into $m$ qubits and $p$ is the worst-case success probability. We find that classical random access codes with private randomness, which form a subclass of this QRAC model, violate the bound. We embed these classical codes as QRACs with diagonal encoding states and commuting decoding measurements, and construct pure-state realizations with identical decoding statistics. The achievability theorem of Ambainis, Nayak, Ta-Shma, and Vazirani then yields violations for every fixed $p\in(1/2,1)$ at sufficiently large input length. The counterexamples span the full open interval between the conjectured and Nayak bounds at each fixed compression rate. A finite-blocklength analysis further yields order-optimal logarithmic qubit scaling for a recovery bias scaling as $\sqrt{\log_2 n/n}$ with a sufficiently large prefactor. These results identify the classical coding rate as the source of the separation and motivate restricted bounds based on quantitative spectral properties of decoding measurements.