Coherent Communication of Classical Messages

We define coherent communication in terms of a simple primitive, show it is equivalent to the ability to send a classical message with a unitary or isometric operation, and use it to relate other resources in quantum information theory. Using coherent communication, we are able to generalize superdense coding to prepare arbitrary quantum states instead of only classical messages. We also derive single-letter formulas for the classical and quantum capacities of a bipartite unitary gate assisted by an arbitrary fixed amount of entanglement per use.