Quantum state discrimination underlies various applications in quantum information processing tasks. It essentially describes the distinguishability of quantum systems in different states, and the general process of extracting classical information from quantum systems. It is also useful in quantum information applications, such as the characterization of mutual information in cryptographic protocols, or as a technique for deriving fundamental theorems on quantum foundations. It has deep connections to physical principles such as relativistic causality. Quantum state discrimination traces a long history of several decades, starting with the early attempts to formalize information processing of physical systems such as optical communication with photons. Nevertheless, in most cases, the problems of finding optimal strategies of quantum state discrimination remain unsolved, and related applications are valid in some limited cases only. The present review aims to provide an overview on quantum state discrimination, covering some recent progress, and addressing applications in some selected areas. This review serves to strengthen the link between results in quantum state discrimination and quantum information applications, by showing the ways in which the fundamental results are exploited in applications and vice versa.

The impossibility of perfect cloning and state estimation are two fundamental results in quantum mechanics. It has been conjectured that quantum cloning becomes equivalent to state estimation in the asymptotic regime where the number of clones tends to infinity. We prove this conjecture using two known results of quantum information theory: the monogamy of quantum correlations and the properties of entanglement breaking channels.

We provide a general formalism to characterize the cryptographic properties of quantum channels in the realistic scenario where the two honest parties employ prepare and measure protocols and the known two-way communication reconciliation techniques. We obtain a necessary and sufficient condition to distill a secret key using this type of schemes for Pauli qubit channels and generalized Pauli channels in higher dimension. Our results can be applied to standard protocols such as Bennett-Brassard 1984 or six-state, giving a critical error rate of 20% and 27.6%, respectively. We explore several possibilities to enlarge these bounds, without any improvement. These results suggest that there may exist weakly entangling channels useless for key distribution using prepare and measure schemes.

Structural approximations to positive, but not completely positive maps are approximate physical realizations of these nonphysical maps. They find applications in the design of direct entanglement-detection methods. We show that many of these approximations, in the relevant case of optimal positive maps, define an entanglement breaking channel and, consequently, can be implemented via a measurement and state-preparation protocol. We also show how our findings can be useful for the design of better and simpler direct entanglement detection methods.

One of the most fundamental results in quantum information theory is that no measurement can perfectly discriminate between nonorthogonal quantum states. In this work, we investigate quantum advantages for discrimination tasks over noncontextual theories by considering a maximum-confidence measurement that unifies different strategies of quantum state discrimination, including minimum-error and unambiguous discrimination. We first show that maximum-confidence discrimination, as well as unambiguous discrimination, contains contextual advantages. We then consider a semi-device-independent scenario of certifying maximum-confidence measurement. The scenario naturally contains undetected events, making it a natural setting to explore maximum-confidence measurements. We show that the certified maximum confidence in quantum theory also contains contextual advantages. Our results establish how the advantages of quantum theory over a classical model may appear in a realistic scenario of a discrimination task.