Superdense coding is a paradigmatic protocol in quantum information science, employing a quantum communication channel to send classical information more efficiently. As we show here, it can be understood as a particular case of a prepare and measure experiment, a scenario that has attracted growing attention for its fundamental and practical applications. Formulating superdense coding as a prepare and measure scenario allows us to provide a semi-device-independent witness of entanglement that significantly improves over previous tests. Furthermore, we also show how to adapt our results into self-testing of maximally entangled states and also provide a semidefinite program formulation allowing one to efficiently optimize, for any shared quantum state, the probability of success in the superdense coding protocol.

• Received 15 December 2020
• Accepted 5 February 2021

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.103.022426