A couple of days ago I finally released the first Julia project I had alluded to, a technique to compute key rates in QKD using proper conic methods. The paper is out, and the github repository is now public. It’s the first paper from my new research group in Valladolid, and I’m very happy about it. First because of the paper, and secondly because now I have students to do the hard work for me.
The inspiration for this paper came from the Prado museum in Madrid. I was forced to go there as a part of a group retreat (at the time I was part of Miguel Navascués’ group in Vienna), and I was bored out of my mind looking at painting after painting1. I then went to the museum cafe and started reading some papers on conic optimization to pass the time. To my great surprise, I found out that there was an algorithm capable of handling the relative entropy cone, and moreover it had already been implemented in the solver Hypatia, which to top it off was written in Julia! Sounded like Christmas had come early. ¿Or maybe I had a jamón overdose?
Life wasn’t so easy, though: the relative entropy cone was implemented only for real matrices, and the complex case is the only one that matters2. I thought no problem, I can just do the generalization myself. Then I opened the source code, and I changed my mind. This cone is a really nasty beast. The PSD cone is a child’s birthday in comparison. I was too busy with other projects at the time to seriously dedicate to it, so I wrote to the developers of Hypatia, Chris Coey and Lea Kapelevich, asking whether they were interested in doing the complex case. And they were! I just helped a little bit with testing and benchmarking.
Now I can’t really publish a paper based only on doing this, but luckily the problem turned out to be much more difficult: I realized that the relative entropy cone couldn’t actually be used to compute key rates. The reason is somewhat technical: in order to solve the problem reliably one cannot have singular matrices, it needs to be formulated in terms of their support only (the technical details are in the paper). But if one reformulates the problem in terms of the support of the matrices, it’s no longer possible to write it in terms of the relative entropy cone3.
I had to come up with a new cone, and implement it from scratch. Now that’s enough material for a paper. To make things better, by this time I was already in Valladolid, so my students could do the hard work. Now it’s done. ¡Thanks Andrés, thanks Pablo, thanks Miguel!