Dense Coding With Multipartite Quantum States

We consider generalizations of the dense coding protocol with an arbitrary number of senders and either one or two receivers, sharing a multiparty quantum state, and using a noiseless channel. For the case of a single receiver, the capacity of such information transfer is found exactly. It is shown that the capacity is not enhanced by allowing the senders to perform joint operations. We provide a nontrivial upper bound on the capacity in the case of two receivers. We also give a classification of the set of all multiparty states in terms of their usefulness for dense coding. We provide examples for each of these classes, and discuss some of their properties.