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arXiv:2510.19111

Generalised Pinching Inequality

Andreas Winter

Published Oct 21, 2025• 0 citations
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Abstract

Hayashi's Pinching Inequality, which establishes a matrix inequality between a semidefinite matrix and a multiple of its "pinched" version via a projective measurement, has found many applications in quantum information theory and beyond. Here, we show a very simple proof of it, which lends itself immediately to natural generalisations where the different projections of the measurement have different weights, and where the matrix inequality can be reversed. As an application we show how the generalised pinching inequality in the case of binary measurements gives rise to a novel gentle measurement lemma, where matrix ordering replaces approximation in trace norm.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2510.19111

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Hayashi's Pinching Inequality, which establishes a matrix inequality between a semidefinite matrix and a multiple of its "pinched" version via a projective measurement, has found many applications in quantum information theory and beyond. Here, we show a very simple proof of it, which lends itself immediately to natural generalisations where the different projections of the measurement have different weights, and where the matrix inequality can be reversed. As an application we show how the generalised pinching inequality in the case of binary measurements gives rise to a novel gentle measurement lemma, where matrix ordering replaces approximation in trace norm.
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We prove several trace inequalities that extend the Golden–Thompson and the Araki–Lieb–Thirring inequality to arbitrarily many matrices. In particular, we strengthen Lieb’s triple matrix inequality. As an example application of our four matrix extension of the Golden–Thompson inequality, we prove remainder terms for the monotonicity of the quantum relative entropy and strong sub-additivity of the von Neumann entropy in terms of recoverability. We find the first explicit remainder terms that are tight in the commutative case. Our proofs rely on complex interpolation theory as well as asymptotic spectral pinching, providing a transparent approach to treat generic multivariate trace inequalities.
The quantum relative entropy between two states satisfies a monotonicity property meaning that applying the same quantum channel to both states can never increase their relative entropy. It is known that this inequality is only tight when there is a recovery map that exactly reverses the effects of the quantum channel on both states. In this paper, we strengthen this inequality by showing that the difference of relative entropies is bounded below by the measured relative entropy between the first state and a recovered state from its processed version. The recovery map is a convex combination of rotated Petz recovery maps and perfectly reverses the quantum channel on the second state. As a special case, we reproduce recent lower bounds on the conditional mutual information, such as the one proved by Fawzi and Renner. Our proof only relies on the elementary properties of pinching maps and the operator logarithm.
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