Study of the security of quantum key distribution protocols has provided us a deeper understanding about the trade-off between the amount of information extracted from a quantum system and the disturbance left in the system as a result of the extraction process. Here we discuss how such a new development helps us to understand the quantum correlations in a quantitative way. A detailed analysis of the information-disturbance trade-off for the zero-disturbance cases leads to a simple structure theorem, and the theorem can be used to derive an exact formula for the compressibility of quantum signals, which is a measure of quantum correlations in terms of the cost to preserve them. The analysis including the nonzero disturbance cases has a very close connection to the theory of entanglement. While the distillable key is regarded as a measure of entanglement, it does not coincide with either of the two operational measures of entanglement, the distillable entanglement and the entanglement cost. We discuss the physical meaning of the difference between these three measures of entanglement by providing each of them with an alternative operational definition.
Study of the security of quantum key distribution protocols has provided us a deeper understanding about the trade-off between the amount of information extracted from a quantum system and the disturbance left in the system as a result of the extraction process. Here we discuss how such a new development helps us to understand the quantum correlations in a quantitative way. A detailed analysis of the information-disturbance trade-off for the zero-disturbance cases leads to a simple structure theorem, and the theorem can be used to derive an exact formula for the compressibility of quantum signals, which is a measure of quantum correlations in terms of the cost to preserve them. The analysis including the nonzero disturbance cases has a very close connection to the theory of entanglement. While the distillable key is regarded as a measure of entanglement, it does not coincide with either of the two operational measures of entanglement, the distillable entanglement and the entanglement cost. We discuss the physical meaning of the difference between these three measures of entanglement by providing each of them with an alternative operational definition.
Abstract Quantum information theory is built upon the realisation that quantum resources like coherence and entanglement can be exploited for novel or enhanced ways of transmitting and manipulating information, such as quantum cryptography, teleportation, and quantum computing. We now know that there is potentially much more than entanglement behind the power of quantum information processing. There exist more general forms of non-classical correlations, stemming from fundamental principles such as the necessary disturbance induced by a local measurement, or the persistence of quantum coherence in all possible local bases. These signatures can be identified and are resilient in almost all quantum states, and have been linked to the enhanced performance of certain quantum protocols over classical ones in noisy conditions. Their presence represents, among other things, one of the most essential manifestations of quantumness in cooperative systems, from the subatomic to the macroscopic domain. In this work we give an overview of the current quest for a proper understanding and characterisation of the frontier between classical and quantum correlations (QCs) in composite states. We focus on various approaches to define and quantify general QCs, based on different yet interlinked physical perspectives, and comment on the operational significance of the ensuing measures for quantum technology tasks such as information encoding, distribution, discrimination and metrology. We then provide a broader outlook of a few applications in which quantumness beyond entanglement looks fit to play a key role.
Quantum entanglement is a key physical resource in quantum information processing that allows for performing basic quantum tasks such as teleportation and quantum key distribution, which are impossible in the classical world. Ever since the rise of quantum information theory, it has been an open problem to quantify entanglement in an information-theoretically meaningful way. In particular, every previously defined entanglement measure bearing a precise information-theoretic meaning is not known to be efficiently computable, or if it is efficiently computable, then it is not known to have a precise information-theoretic meaning. In this Letter, we meet this challenge by introducing an entanglement measure that has a precise information-theoretic meaning as the exact cost required to prepare an entangled state when two distant parties are allowed to perform quantum operations that completely preserve the positivity of the partial transpose. Additionally, this entanglement measure is efficiently computable by means of a semidefinite program, and it bears a number of useful properties such as additivity and faithfulness. Our results bring key insights into the fundamental entanglement structure of arbitrary quantum states, and they can be used directly to assess and quantify the entanglement produced in quantum-physical experiments.
Macroscopic behavior such as the lack of interference patterns has been attributed to ``decoherence,'' a word with several possible definitions such as (1) the loss of off-diagonal density matrix elements, (2) the flow of information to the environment, (3) the loss of complementary information, and (4) the loss of the ability to create entanglement in a measurement. In this article, we attempt to unify these distinct definitions by providing general quantitative connections between them, valid for all finite-dimensional quantum systems or quantum processes. The most important application of our results is to the understanding of quantum discord, a measure of the nonclassicality of the correlations between quantum systems. We show that some popular measures of discord measure the information missing from the purifying system and hence quantify security, which can be stated operationally in terms of distillable secure bits. The results also give some strategies for constructing discord measures.
Quantum entanglement is the most popular kind of quantum correlations. Its role in several tasks in quantum information theory like quantum cryptography, quantum dense coding and quantum teleportation is indisputable. The role of entanglement in quantum algorithms has also attracted enormous amount of attention in the literature. The research in this direction is motivated by the finding that a quantum computer can efficiently factorize arbitrary integer numbers. Since no classical algorithm is known today that can solve this problem efficiently, this example clearly demonstrates the superiority of a quantum computer compared to its classical counterpart. In this context, entanglement also plays a crucial role: if the quantum computer operates on a pure state without entanglement, then the computational process can be simulated efficiently on a classical computer. In this case entanglement is the key ingredient that makes the difference between a quantum and a classical computer.
However, the situation is more involved if the computational process is not perfect. In this case the quantum computer operates on a mixed state, and the role of entanglement is less obvious. A seminal result in this direction is a quantum algorithm known under the acronym DQC1. This algorithm operates on an almost maximally mixed state with vanishingly little entanglement. However, DQC1 can still perform tasks efficiently for which no efficient classical algorithm is known today. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that entanglement in general is not related to the efficiency of a quantum algorithm.
Triggered by this observation other kinds of quantum correlations have been studied. In this context a particular measure of quantum correlations known as quantum discord is referred to frequently in the literature. Quantum discord is a measure of quantum correlations beyond entanglement, i.e., a quantum state can have no entanglement, but nonvanishing quantum discord. Quantum discord is also regarded as the key resource in the DQC1 algorithm. Although this statement is still controversial, it was shown under very general assumptions that quantum discord is required if a quantum computer is to show an exponential speedup over any classical algorithm.
In this thesis we give a short introduction into the theory of entanglement and general quantum correlations, and further discuss our results. In particular, we show that two different kinds of entanglement measures can coincide. This result is used to build an algorithm for computing entanglement. We also consider the role of quantum correlations for the distribution of entanglement and for the quantum measurement process. We further discuss the behavior of quantum correlations under local noise, and their monogamy properties.
Winter's measurement compression theorem stands as one of the most penetrating insights of quantum information theory. In addition to making an original and profound statement about measurement in quantum theory, it also underlies several other general protocols used for entanglement distillation and local purity distillation. The theorem provides for an asymptotic decomposition of any quantum measurement into noise and information . This decomposition leads to an optimal protocol for having a sender simulate many independent instances of a quantum measurement and send the measurement outcomes to a receiver, using as little communication as possible. The protocol assumes that the parties have access to some amount of common randomness, which is a strictly weaker resource than classical communication. In this review, we provide a second look at Winter's measurement compression theorem, detailing the information processing task, giving examples for understanding it, reviewing Winter's achievability proof, and detailing a new approach to its single-letter converse theorem. We prove an extension of the theorem to the case in which the sender is not required to receive the outcomes of the simulated measurement. The total cost of common randomness and classical communication can be lower for such a 'non-feedback' simulation, and we prove a single-letter converse theorem demonstrating optimality. We then review the Devetak–Winter theorem on classical data compression with quantum side information, providing new proofs of its achievability and converse parts. From there, we outline a new protocol that we call 'measurement compression with quantum side information,' announced previously by two of us in our work on triple trade-offs in quantum Shannon theory. This protocol has several applications, including its part in the 'classically-assisted state redistribution' protocol, which is the most general protocol on the static side of the quantum information theory tree, and its role in reducing the classical communication cost in a task known as local purity distillation. We also outline a connection between measurement compression with quantum side information and recent work on entropic uncertainty relations in the presence of quantum memory. Finally, we prove a single-letter theorem characterizing measurement compression with quantum side information when the sender is not required to obtain the measurement outcome.