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arXiv:1608.04750 · Journal of High Energy Physics

Conditional mutual information of bipartite unitaries and scrambling

Dawei Ding, Patrick M. Hayden, Michael Walter

Published Dec 1, 2016• 42 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

One way to diagnose chaos in bipartite unitary channels is via the tripartite information of the corresponding Choi state, which for certain choices of the subsystems reduces to the negative conditional mutual information (CMI). We study this quantity from a quantum information-theoretic perspective to clarify its role in diagnosing scrambling. When the CMI is zero, we find that the channel has a special normal form consisting of local channels between individual inputs and outputs. However, we find that arbitrarily low CMI does not imply arbitrary proximity to a channel of this form, although it does imply a type of approximate recoverability of one of the inputs. When the CMI is maximal, we find that the residual channel from an individual input to an individual output is completely depolarizing when the other input is maximally mixed. However, we again find that this result is not robust. We also extend some of these results to the multipartite case and to the case of Haar-random pure input states. Finally, we look at the relationship between tripartite information and its Rényi-2 version which is directly related to out-of-time-order correlation functions. In particular, we demonstrate an arbitrarily large gap between the two quantities.

DOI
10.1007/jhep12(2016)145

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One way to diagnose chaos in bipartite unitary channels is via the tripartite information of the corresponding Choi state, which for certain choices of the subsystems reduces to the negative conditional mutual information (CMI). We study this quantity from a quantum information-theoretic perspective to clarify its role in diagnosing scrambling. When the CMI is zero, we find that the channel has a special normal form consisting of local channels between individual inputs and outputs. However, we find that arbitrarily low CMI does not imply arbitrary proximity to a channel of this form, although it does imply a type of approximate recoverability of one of the inputs. When the CMI is maximal, we find that the residual channel from an individual input to an individual output is completely depolarizing when the other input is maximally mixed. However, we again find that this result is not robust. We also extend some of these results to the multipartite case and to the case of Haar-random pure input states. Finally, we look at the relationship between tripartite information and its Rényi-2 version which is directly related to out-of-time-order correlation functions. In particular, we demonstrate an arbitrarily large gap between the two quantities.
We study chaos and scrambling in unitary channels by considering their entanglement properties as states. Using out-of-time-order correlation functions to diagnose chaos, we characterize the ability of a channel to process quantum information. We show that the generic decay of such correlators implies that any input subsystem must have near vanishing mutual information with almost all partitions of the output. Additionally, we propose the negativity of the tripartite information of the channel as a general diagnostic of scrambling. This measures the delocalization of information and is closely related to the decay of out-of-time-order correlators. We back up our results with numerics in two non-integrable models and analytic results in a perfect tensor network model of chaotic time evolution. These results show that the butterfly effect in quantum systems implies the information-theoretic definition of scrambling.
Recently, a variety of new measures of quantum Rényi mutual information and quantum Rényi conditional entropy have been proposed, and some of their mathematical properties explored. Here, we show that the Rényi mutual information attains operational significance in the context of composite hypothesis testing, when the null hypothesis is a fixed bipartite state and the alternate hypothesis consists of all product states that share one marginal with the null hypothesis. This hypothesis testing problem occurs naturally in channel coding, where it corresponds to testing whether a state is the output of a given quantum channel or of a “useless” channel whose output is independent of the channel input and environment. Similarly, we establish an operational interpretation of Rényi conditional entropy by choosing an alternative hypothesis that consists of product states that are maximally mixed on one system. Specialized to classical probability distributions, our results also establish an operational interpretation of Rényi mutual information and Rényi conditional entropy.
Many-body states that are invariant under particle relabeling, the permutation symmetric states, occur naturally when the system dynamics is described by symmetric processes or collective spin operators. We derive expressions for the reduced density matrix for arbitrary subsystem decomposition for these states and study properties of permutation symmetric states and their subsystems when the joint system is picked randomly and uniformly. Thus defining an appropriate random matrix ensemble, we find the average linear entropy and von Neumann entropy, which implies that random permutation symmetric states are marginally entangled and as a consequence the tripartite mutual information (TMI) is typically positive, preventing information from being shared globally. Applying these results to the quantum kicked top viewed as a multiqubit system, we find that entanglement, mutual information, and TMI all increase for large subsystems across the Ehrenfest or logarithmic time and saturate at the random state values if there is global chaos. During this time the out-of-time-order correlators evolve exponentially, implying scrambling in phase space. We discuss how positive TMI may coexist with such scrambling.
We study the scrambling of quantum information in local random unitary circuits by focusing on the tripartite information proposed by Hosur et al. We provide exact results for the averaged R\'enyi-2 tripartite information in two cases: (i) the local gates are Haar random and (ii) the local gates are dual-unitary and randomly sampled from a single-site Haar-invariant measure. We show that the latter case defines a one-parameter family of circuits, and prove that for a ``maximally chaotic'' subset of this family quantum information is scrambled faster than in the Haar-random case. Our approach is based on a standard mapping onto an averaged folded tensor network, that can be studied by means of appropriate recurrence relations. By means of the same method, we also revisit the computation of out-of-time-ordered correlation functions, rederiving known formulas for Haar-random unitary circuits, and presenting an exact result for maximally chaotic random dual-unitary gates.
The conditional quantum mutual information I(A; B|C) of a tripartite state ρABC is an information quantity which lies at the center of many problems in quantum information theory. Three of its main properties are that it is non-negative for any tripartite state, that it decreases under local operations applied to systems A and B, and that it obeys the duality relation I(A; B|C) = I(A; B|D) for a four-party pure state on systems ABCD. The conditional mutual information also underlies the squashed entanglement, an entanglement measure that satisfies all of the axioms desired for an entanglement measure. As such, it has been an open question to find Rényi generalizations of the conditional mutual information, that would allow for a deeper understanding of the original quantity and find applications beyond the traditional memoryless setting of quantum information theory. The present paper addresses this question, by defining different α-Rényi generalizations Iα(A; B|C) of the conditional mutual information, some of which we can prove converge to the conditional mutual information in the limit α → 1. Furthermore, we prove that many of these generalizations satisfy non-negativity, duality, and monotonicity with respect to local operations on one of the systems A or B (with it being left as an open question to prove that monotonicity holds with respect to local operations on both systems). The quantities defined here should find applications in quantum information theory and perhaps even in other areas of physics, but we leave this for future work. We also state a conjecture regarding the monotonicity of the Rényi conditional mutual informations defined here with respect to the Rényi parameter α. We prove that this conjecture is true in some special cases and when α is in a neighborhood of one.
A variety of new measures of quantum Rényi mutual information and quantum Rényi conditional entropy have recently been proposed, and some of their mathematical properties explored. Here, we show that the Rényi mutual information attains operational meaning in the context of composite hypothesis testing, when the null hypothesis is a fixed bipartite state and the alternative hypothesis consists of all product states that share one marginal with the null hypothesis. This hypothesis testing problem occurs naturally in channel coding, where it corresponds to testing whether a state is the output of a given quantum channel or of a “useless” channel whose output is decoupled from the environment. Similarly, we establish an operational interpretation of Rényi conditional entropy by choosing an alternative hypothesis that consists of product states that are maximally mixed on one system. Specialized to classical probability distributions, our results also establish an operational interpretation of Rényi mutual information and Rényi conditional entropy.