Alignment of polarized sets

Arikan´s polar coding technique is based on the idea of synthesizing n channels from the n instances of the physical channel by a simple linear encoding transformation. Each synthesized channel corresponds to a particular input to the encoder. For large n, the synthesized channels become either essentially noiseless or almost perfectly noisy, but in total carry as much information as the original n channels. Capacity can therefore be achieved by transmitting messages over the essentially noiseless synthesized channels. Unfortunately, the set of inputs corresponding to reliable synthesized channels is poorly understood, in particular how the set depends on the underlying physical channel. In this work, we present two analytic conditions sufficient to determine if the reliable inputs corresponding to different discrete memoryless channels are aligned or not, i.e. if one set is contained in the other. Understanding the alignment of the polarized sets is important as it is directly related to universality properties of the induced polar codes, which are essential in particular for network coding problems. Finally we show that these conditions imply that the simple quantum polar coding scheme of Renes et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 050504 (2012)] requires entanglement assistance for general channels, but also show such assistance to be unnecessary in many cases of interest.