Purely Quantum Polar Codes

We provide a purely quantum version of polar codes, achieving the coherent information of any quantum channel. Our scheme relies on a recursive channel combining and splitting construction, where random two-qubit Clifford gates are used to combine two single-qubit channels. The inputs to the synthesized bad channels are frozen by sharing EPR pairs between the sender and the receiver, so our scheme is entanglement assisted. We further show that a Pauli channel polarizes if and only if a specific classical channel over a four-symbol input set polarizes. We exploit this equivalence to prove fast polarization for Pauli channels, and to devise an efficient successive cancellation based decoding algorithm for such channels.