  When classical information is sent over a quantum channel, attaining the
ultimate limit to channel capacity requires the receiver to make joint
measurements over long codeword blocks. For a pure-state channel, we construct
a receiver that can attain the ultimate capacity by applying a single-shot
unitary transformation on the received quantum codeword followed by
simultaneous (but separable) projective measurements on the
single-modulation-symbol state spaces. We study the ultimate limits of
photon-information-efficient communications on a lossy bosonic channel. Based
on our general results for the pure-state quantum channel, we show some of the
first concrete examples of codes and structured joint-detection optical
receivers that can achieve fundamentally higher (superadditive) channel
capacity than conventional receivers that detect each modulation symbol
individually.
