We investigate the asymptotic relationship between quantum cloning and quantum estimation from the global point of view where all the copies produced by the cloner are considered jointly. For an N-to-M cloner, we consider the overall fidelity between the state of the M output systems and the state of M ideal copies, and we ask whether the optimal fidelity is attained by a measure-and-prepare protocol in the limit M → ∞. In order to gain intuition into the general problem, we analyze two

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... examples: (i) cloning qubit states on the equator of the Bloch sphere and (ii) cloning two-qubit maximally entangled states. In the first case, we show that the optimal measure-and-prepare fidelity converges to the fidelity of the optimal cloner in the limit M → ∞. In the second case, we restrict our attention to economical covariant cloners, and again, we exhibit a measure-and-prepare protocol that achieves asymptotically the optimal fidelity. Quite counterintuitively, in both cases the optimal states that have to be prepared in order to maximize the overall fidelity are not product states corresponding to M identical copies, but instead suitable M-partite entangled states. 1998 ACM Subject Classification J.2 Physical sciences and engineering