We establish that, in an appropriate limit, qubits of communication should be regarded as composite resources, decomposing cleanly into independent correlation and transmission components. Because qubits of communication can establish ebits of entanglement, qubits are more powerful resources than ebits. We identify a new communications resource, the zero-bit, which is precisely half the gap between them; replacing classical bits by zero-bits makes teleportation asymptotically reversible. The decomposition of a qubit into an ebit and two zero-bits has wide-ranging consequences including applications to state merging, the quantum channel capacity, entanglement distillation, quantum identification and remote state preparation. The source of these results is the theory of approximate quantum error correction. The action of a quantum channel is reversible if and only if no information is leaked to the environment, a characterization that is useful even in approximate form. However, differen 查看全文>>