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arXiv:1402.0602 · Journal of Physics A Mathematical and Theoretical

Tight bounds on accessible information and informational power

Michele Dall’Arno, Francesco Buscemi, Masanao Ozawa

Published May 20, 2014• 18 citations
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Abstract

The accessible information quantifies the amount of classical information that can be extracted from an ensemble of quantum states. Analogously, the informational power quantifies the amount of classical information that can be extracted by a quantum measurement. For both quantities, we provide upper and lower bounds that depend only on the dimension of the system, and we prove their tightness. In the case of symmetric informationally complete (SIC) ensembles and measurements, stronger bounds are provided and their tightness proved for qubits and qutrits. From our upper bounds, we notice, perhaps surprisingly, that the statistics generated by SIC ensembles or measurements in arbitrary dimension, though optimal for tomographic purposes, in fact never contain more than just one bit of information, the rest being constituted by completely random bits. On the other hand, from our lower bounds, we obtain an explicit strategy beating the so-called pretty-good one for the extraction of mutual information in the case of SIC ensembles and measurements.

DOI
10.1088/1751-8113/47/23/235302

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The accessible information quantifies the amount of classical information that can be extracted from an ensemble of quantum states. Analogously, the informational power quantifies the amount of classical information that can be extracted by a quantum measurement. For both quantities, we provide upper and lower bounds that depend only on the dimension of the system, and we prove their tightness. In the case of symmetric informationally complete (SIC) ensembles and measurements, stronger bounds are provided and their tightness proved for qubits and qutrits. From our upper bounds, we notice, perhaps surprisingly, that the statistics generated by SIC ensembles or measurements in arbitrary dimension, though optimal for tomographic purposes, in fact never contain more than just one bit of information, the rest being constituted by completely random bits. On the other hand, from our lower bounds, we obtain an explicit strategy beating the so-called pretty-good one for the extraction of mutual information in the case of SIC ensembles and measurements.
The accessible information and the informational power quantify the amount of information extractable from a quantum ensemble and by a quantum measurement, respectively. So-called spherical quantum 2-designs constitute a class of ensembles and measurements relevant in testing entropic uncertainty relations, quantum cryptography, and quantum tomography. We provide lower bounds on the entropy of 2-design ensembles and measurements, from which upper bounds on their accessible information and informational power follow, as a function of the dimension only. We show that the statistics generated by 2-designs, although optimal for the above-mentioned protocols, never contains more than 1 bit of information. Finally, we specialize our results to the relevant cases of symmetric informationally complete sets and maximal sets of mutually unbiased bases, and we generalize them to the arbitrary-rank case.
The accessible information and the informational power quantify the maximum amount of information that can be extracted from a quantum ensemble and by a quantum measurement, respectively. Here, we investigate the tradeoff between the accessible information (informational power, respectively) and the purity of the states of the ensemble (the elements of the measurement, respectively). Under any given lower bound on the purity, 1) we compute the minimum informational power and show that it is attained by the depolarized uniformly-distributed measurement; and 2) we give a lower bound on the accessible information. Under any given upper bound on the purity, 1) we compute the maximum accessible information and show that it is attained by an ensemble of pairwise commuting states with at most two distinct non-null eigenvalues; and 2) we give a lower bound on the maximum informational power. The present results provide, as a corollary, novel sufficient conditions for the tightness of the Jozsa-Robb-Wootters lower bound to the accessible information.
Informationally complete (IC) measurements are a useful class of measurements, as their outcome statistics uniquely determine an unknown quantum state. Hence, they are important for certain tasks such as quantum state tomography, quantum process tomography, etc. In this work, we study the quantification of informational completeness for arbitrary quantum measurements by introducing and characterizing a faithful measure for it. We explicitly evaluate the informational completeness of qubit symmetric informationally complete (SIC) measurements and show that it is an upper bound for all qubit minimal informationally complete measurements. Furthermore, by introducing a faithful measure, we try to quantify and characterize the ability of an arbitrary quantum channel to preserve the informational completeness of any IC measurement when the channel acts on it in the Heisenberg picture. We call this measure informational completeness-preservability (IC preservability) of quantum channels. After studying its properties, we establish its relation to another quantity, namely, the absolute output coherence of a quantum channel, which quantifies the minimum amount of coherence (w.r.t. an arbitrary incoherent basis) that can always be obtained from the output of that channel. Finally, we illustrate our results with an example from light-matter interaction scenarios. Thus, in this work, not only do we try to provide a quantitative framework for studying both the informational completeness of quantum measurements and the ability of quantum channels to preserve it, but we also try to offer key insight into the conceptual relation between informational completeness and quantum coherence.
Quantum theory imposes fundamental limitations on the amount of information that can be carried by any quantum system. On the one hand, the Holevo bound rules out the possibility of encoding more information in a quantum system than in its classical counterpart, comprised of perfectly distinguishable states. On the other hand, when states are uniformly distributed in the state space, the so-called subentropy lower bound is saturated. How uniform quantum systems are can be naturally quantified by characterizing them as ttt-designs, with $t=\ensuremath{\infty}$ corresponding to the uniform distribution. Here we show the existence of a trade-off between the uniformity of a quantum system and the amount of information it can carry. To this aim, we derive a hierarchy of informational bounds as a function of ttt and prove their tightness for qubits and qutrits. By deriving asymptotic formulas for large dimensions, we also show that the statistics generated by any ttt-design with t>1t>1t>1 contains no more than a single bit of information, and this amount decreases with ttt. Holevo and subentropy bounds are recovered as particular cases for t=1t=1t=1 and $t=\ensuremath{\infty}$, respectively.
We introduce the informational power of a quantum measurement as the maximum amount of classical information that the measurement can extract from any ensemble of quantum states. We prove the additivity by showing that the informational power corresponds to the classical capacity of a quantum-classical channel. We restate the problem of evaluating the informational power as the maximization of the accessible information of a suitable ensemble. We provide a numerical algorithm to find an optimal ensemble and quantify the informational power.
The unpredictability of quantum physics gives rise to intrinsic randomness. In an adversarial scenario, any additional degrees of freedom must be attributed to an eavesdropper with correlations to the measurement set-up. The true randomness is then quantified by the probability that she correctly guesses the measurement outcomes, optimised over all possible strategies. Extremal measurements are appealing here, since they do not allow information to leak to such an eavesdropper. Beyond projective measurements, however, a simple question remains open: how much intrinsic randomness can be generated by a given extremal measurement? In a step towards solving it, we characterise the randomness generated by any unbiased extremal rank-one measurement acting on any state, solving the problem explicitly in dimension two. Four-outcome qubit measurements of this type are tomographic, so these results hold for fully source-device-dependent randomness too. The tetrahedral symmetric informationally complete (SIC) measurement, we find, has the least intrinsic randomness within this class. We also present the skewed SIC family of measurements, and use them to partially solve an open problem: we prove that 2log⁡d2 \log d2logd bits of randomness, the maximal amount, can be generated device-dependently (or source-device-independently) in any dimension in which there exists a SIC measurement.