Optimal State Discrimination Using Particle Statistics

We present an application of particle statistics to the problem of optimal ambiguous discrimination of quantum states. The states to be discriminated are encoded in the internal degrees of freedom of identical particles, and we use the bunching and antibunching of the external degrees of freedom to discriminate between various internal states. We show that we can achieve the optimal single-shot discrimination probability using only the effects of particle statistics. We discuss interesting applications of our method to detecting entanglement and purifying mixed states. Our scheme can easily be implemented with the current technology