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arXiv:2410.14472 · IEEE Transactions on Information Theory

The Multimode Conditional Quantum Entropy Power Inequality and the Squashed Entanglement of the Extreme Multimode Bosonic Gaussian Channels

Alessandro Falco, Giacomo De Palma

Published May 22, 2025• 1 citation
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Abstract

We prove the multimode conditional quantum Entropy Power Inequality for bosonic quantum systems. This inequality determines the minimum conditional von Neumann entropy of the output of the most general linear mixing of bosonic quantum modes among all the input states of the modes with given conditional entropies. Bosonic quantum systems constitute the mathematical model for the electromagnetic radiation in the quantum regime, which provides the most promising platform for quantum communication and quantum key distribution. We apply our multimode conditional quantum Entropy Power Inequality to determine new lower bounds to the squashed entanglement of a large family of bosonic quantum Gaussian states. The squashed entanglement is one of the main entanglement measures in quantum communication theory, providing the best known upper bound to the distillable key. Exploiting this result, we determine a new lower bound to the squashed entanglement of the multimode bosonic Gaussian channels that are extreme,i.e., that cannot be decomposed as a non-trivial convex combination of quantum channels. The squashed entanglement of a quantum channel provides an upper bound to its secret-key capacity,i.e., the capacity to generate a secret key shared between the sender and the receiver. Lower bounds to the squashed entanglement are notoriously hard to prove. Our results contribute to break this barrier and will stimulate further research in the field of quantum communication with bosonic quantum systems.

DOI
10.1109/tit.2025.3572786

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We prove the multimode conditional quantum Entropy Power Inequality for bosonic quantum systems. This inequality determines the minimum conditional von Neumann entropy of the output of the most general linear mixing of bosonic quantum modes among all the input states of the modes with given conditional entropies. Bosonic quantum systems constitute the mathematical model for the electromagnetic radiation in the quantum regime, which provides the most promising platform for quantum communication and quantum key distribution. We apply our multimode conditional quantum Entropy Power Inequality to determine new lower bounds to the squashed entanglement of a large family of bosonic quantum Gaussian states. The squashed entanglement is one of the main entanglement measures in quantum communication theory, providing the best known upper bound to the distillable key. Exploiting this result, we determine a new lower bound to the squashed entanglement of the multimode bosonic Gaussian channels that are extreme,i.e., that cannot be decomposed as a non-trivial convex combination of quantum channels. The squashed entanglement of a quantum channel provides an upper bound to its secret-key capacity,i.e., the capacity to generate a secret key shared between the sender and the receiver. Lower bounds to the squashed entanglement are notoriously hard to prove. Our results contribute to break this barrier and will stimulate further research in the field of quantum communication with bosonic quantum systems.
This paper defines the squashed entanglement of a quantum channel as the maximum squashed entanglement that can be registered by a sender and receiver at the input and output of a quantum channel, respectively. A new subadditivity inequality for the original squashed entanglement measure of Christandl and Winter leads to the conclusion that the squashed entanglement of a quantum channel is an additive function of a tensor product of any two quantum channels. More importantly, this new subadditivity inequality, along with prior results of Christandl and Winter, establishes the squashed entanglement of a quantum channel as an upper bound on the quantum communication capacity of any channel assisted by unlimited forward and backward classical communication. A similar proof establishes this quantity as an upper bound on the private capacity of a quantum channel assisted by unlimited forward and backward public classical communication. This latter result is relevant as a limitation on rates achievable in quantum key distribution. As an important application, we determine that these capacities can never exceed (log (1+η)/(1-η)) for a pure-loss bosonic channel for which a fraction (η) of the input photons make it to the output on average. The best known lower bound on these capacities is equal to (log (1/(1-η)). Thus, in the high-loss regime for which η ≪ 1), this new upper bound demonstrates that the protocols corresponding to the above lower bound are nearly optimal.
We define the squashed entanglement of a quantum channel as the maximum squashed entanglement that can be registered by a sender and receiver at the input and output of a quantum channel, respectively. A new subadditivity inequality for the original squashed entanglement measure of Christandl and Winter leads to the conclusion that the squashed entanglement of a quantum channel is an additive function of a tensor product of any two quantum channels. More importantly, this new subadditivity inequality, along with prior results of Christandl, Winter, et al., establishes the squashed entanglement of a quantum channel as an upper bound on the quantum communication capacity of any channel assisted by unlimited forward and backward classical communication. A similar proof establishes this quantity as an upper bound on the private capacity of a quantum channel assisted by unlimited forward and backward public classical communication. This latter result is relevant as a limitation on rates achievable in quantum key distribution. As an important application, we determine that these capacities can never exceed log((1 + η)=(1 - η)) for a pure-loss bosonic channel for which a fraction η of the input photons make it to the output on average. The best known lower bound on these capacities is equal to log(1=(1 - η)). Thus, in the high-loss regime for which η ≪ 1, this new upper bound demonstrates that the protocols corresponding to the above lower bound are nearly optimal.
We prove that quantum thermal Gaussian input states minimize the output entropy of the multi-mode quantum Gaussian attenuators and amplifiers that are entanglement breaking and of the multi-mode quantum Gaussian phase contravariant channels among all the input states with an given entropy. This is the first time that this property is proven for a multi-mode channel without restrictions on the input states. A striking consequence of this result is a new lower bound on the output entropy of all the multi-mode quantum Gaussian attenuators and amplifiers in terms of the input entropy. We apply this bound to determine new upper bounds to the communication rates in two different scenarios. The first is classical communication to two receivers with the quantum degraded Gaussian broadcast channel. The second is the simultaneous classical communication, quantum communication and entanglement generation or the simultaneous public classical communication, private classical communication, and quantum key distribution with the Gaussian quantum-limited attenuator.
With the rapid growth of quantum technologies, knowing the fundamental characteristics of quantum systems and protocols is essential for their effective implementation. A particular communication setting that has received increased focus is related to quantum key distribution and distributed quantum computation. In this setting, a quantum channel connects a sender to a receiver, and their goal is to distill either a secret key or entanglement, along with the help of arbitrary local operations and classical communication (LOCC). In this work, we establish a general theory of energy-constrained, LOCC-assisted private and quantum capacities of quantum channels, which are the maximum rates at which an LOCC-assisted quantum channel can reliably establish a secret key or entanglement, respectively, subject to an energy constraint on the channel input states. We prove that the energy-constrained squashed entanglement of a channel is an upper bound on these capacities. We also explicitly prove that a thermal state maximizes a relaxation of the squashed entanglement of all phase-insensitive, single-mode input bosonic Gaussian channels, generalizing results from prior work. After doing so, we prove that a variation of the method introduced by Goodenough et al. [New J. Phys. 18, 063005 (2016)] leads to improved upper bounds on the energy-constrained secret-key-agreement capacity of a bosonic thermal channel. We then consider a multipartite setting and prove that two known multipartite generalizations of the squashed entanglement are in fact equal. We finally show that the energy-constrained, multipartite squashed entanglement plays a role in bounding the energy-constrained LOCC-assisted private and quantum capacity regions of quantum broadcast channels.
We prove a generalization of the strong subadditivity of the von Neumann entropy for bosonic quantum Gaussian systems. Such generalization determines the minimum values of linear combinations of the entropies of subsystems associated to arbitrary linear functions of the quadratures, and holds for arbitrary quantum states including the scenario where the entropies are conditioned on a memory quantum system. We apply our result to prove new entropic uncertainty relations with quantum memory, a generalization of the quantum Entropy Power Inequality, and the linear time scaling of the entanglement entropy produced by quadratic Hamiltonians.
The squashed entanglement of a quantum channel is an additive function of quantum channels, which finds application as an upper bound on the rate at which secret key and entanglement can be generated when using a quantum channel a large number of times in addition to unlimited classical communication. This quantity has led to an upper bound of log((1+η)/(1-η)) on the capacity of a pure-loss bosonic channel for such a task, where η is the average fraction of photons that make it from the input to the output of the channel. The purpose of this paper is to extend these results beyond the single-sender single-receiver setting to the more general case of a single sender and multiple receivers (a quantum broadcast channel). We employ multipartite generalizations of the squashed entanglement to constrain the rates at which secret key and entanglement can be generated between any subset of the users of such a channel, along the way developing several new properties of these measures. We apply our results to the case of a pure-loss broadcast channel with one sender and two receivers.