The quantity mutual information is introduced as a good measure of the quantum-mechanical uncertainty of a state. The mutual information is the measured value of entropy for both discrete and continuous variables, with the resolution of the measuring device as a constraint. The mutual information is calculated for coherent states and squeezed states; the values of the variables before and after the measurement are assumed to be correlated Gaussian, with correlation coefficient γ. It is found that the information increases or decreases from the corresponding coherent state value, depending on γ.
The quantity mutual information is introduced as a good measure of the quantum-mechanical uncertainty of a state. The mutual information is the measured value of entropy for both discrete and continuous variables, with the resolution of the measuring device as a constraint. The mutual information is calculated for coherent states and squeezed states; the values of the variables before and after the measurement are assumed to be correlated Gaussian, with correlation coefficient γ. It is found that the information increases or decreases from the corresponding coherent state value, depending on γ.
In this chapter, we discuss several information measures that are important for quantifying the amount of information and correlations that are present in quantum systems. The first fundamental measure that we introduce is the von Neumann entropy (or simply quantum entropy ). It is the quantum generalization of the Shannon entropy, but it captures both classical and quantum uncertainty in a quantum state.1 The quantum entropy gives meaning to the notion of an information qubit . This notion is different from that of the physical qubit, which is the description of a quantum state of an electron or a photon. The information qubit is the fundamental quantum informational unit of measure, determining how much quantum information is present in a quantum system. The initial definitions here are analogous to the classical definitions of entropy, but we soon discover a radical departure from the intuitive classical notions from the previous chapter: the conditional quantum entropy can be negative for certain quantum states. In the classical world, this negativity simply does not occur, but it takes on a special meaning in quantum information theory. Pure quantum states that are entangled have stronger-than-classical correlations and are examples of states that have negative conditional entropy. The negative of the conditional quantum entropy is so important in quantum information theory that we even have a special name for it: the coherent information. We discover that the coherent information obeys a quantum data-processing inequality, placing it on a firm footing as a particular informational measure of quantum correlations. We then define several other quantum information measures, such as quantum mutual information, that bear similar definitions as in the classical world, but with Shannon entropies replaced with quantum entropies. This replacement may seem to make quantum entropy somewhat trivial on the surface, but a simple calculation reveals that a maximally entangled state on two qubits registers two bits of quantum mutual information (recall that the largest the mutual information can be in the classical world is one bit for the case of two maximally correlated bits). We then discuss several entropy inequalities that play an important role in quantum information processing: the monotonicity of quantum relative entropy, strong subadditivity, the quantum data-processing inequalities, and continuity of quantum entropy.
The concept of entropy rst arose in the study of thermodynamics and statistical me- chanics. In information theory the so-called Shannon entropy plays a signi cant role, which measures how much information we gain, on average, when we learn the value of a random variable. An alternative interpretation is that the entropy of the random variable quanti es the amount of uncertainty about the random variable before we learn its value. The concept was introduced by Claude E. Shannon in his 1948 paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication". In the rst part of the present work we consider this fundamental measure of information and show some of its properties, such as non-negativity. The relative entropy or the Kullback-Leibler divergence is a very useful measure of the distance between two prob- ability distributions. After introducing its de nition and other notions (joint entropy, conditional entropy or mutual information) we can prove additional assertions about the Shannon entropy and present statements about the relations between the above men- tioned quantities. In quantum information theory, there is a quantity, namely von Neumann entropy, which corresponds to Shannon entropy and originates from it. In the section Von Neu- mann entropy we will introduce this quantity which is a continuous functional on the states, or on their mathematical representatives, the density operators, and it ful ls in- equalities such as subadditivity and strong subaddititvity. Just as with the Shannon entropy, it is extremely useful to de ne a quantum version of the relative entropy, which is one of the most important numerical quantities appearing in quantum information theory. It is used as a measure of distinguishability between quantum states. Among others its properties are jointly convexity, monotonicity which are speci cally convenient. Transformations on structures which preserve operations, quantities or relations among elements appear in many areas of mathematics. These are the so-called preservers which show up also in physics and even in chemistry where they are usually called symmetries. Therefore, the study of preserver transformations is an important area of research. The third section of this work is based on a paper, in which Lajos Molnár described the structure every bijective map on the space of all density operators on a given Hilbert space, which preserves the relative entropy. This result is closely related to Wigner's famous theorem on the form of quantum mechanical symmetry transformations. The above theorem of Molnár can be extended into two directions. On the one hand, the result holds also in the case when the transformation under consideration acts on the space of all positive semide nite operators not only on density operators (i.e., we omit the condition of unit trace). On the other hand the statement remains valid even if we omit the strongly restrictive condition that the transformation is bijective. The second result is a joint work with Prof. Lajos Molnár which appeared in the journal Linear Algebra and Its Applications.
The information provided by a classical measurement is unambiguously determined by the mutual information between the output results and the measured quantity. However, quantum mechanically there are at least two notions of information gathering which can be considered, one characterizing the information provided about the initial preparation, useful in communication, and the other characterizing the information about the final state, useful in state-preparation and control. Here we are interested in understanding the properties of these measures, and the information gathering capacities of quantum and classical measurements. We provide a partial answer to the question `in what sense does information gain increase with initial uncertainty?' by showing that, for classical and quantum measurements which are symmetric with respect to reversible transformations of the state space, the information gain regarding the initial state always increases with the observer's initial uncertainty. In addition, we calculate the capacity of all unitarily covariant and commutative permutation-symmetric measurements for obtaining classical information. While it is the von Neumann entropy of the effects which appears in the latter capacity, it is the subentropy which appears in the expression for the former.
Quantum mutual information is a fundamental quantity for characterizing correlations among quantum systems. In this work, we investigate the dynamic evolution of the quantum mutual information based on Rényi-2 entropy for three-mode Gaussian states in the background of a Schwarzschild black hole. We find that the physically inaccessible mutual information increases with Hawking temperature and eventually saturates, while the physically accessible mutual information exhibits nonmonotonic temperature dependence: it first rises, reaches a peak, then declines toward a finite asymptotic value. This nonmonotonic behavior differs from the monotonic degradation typically observed for Gaussian entanglement and steering in curved spacetime. Furthermore, we establish several constraint relations governing the distribution of mutual information among subsystems. These findings contribute to understanding the quantumness of quantum correlations for continuous variable in Schwarzschild spacetime.
It is well known that a Shannon-based definition of information entropy leads in the classical case to the Boltzmann entropy. It is tempting to regard the von Neumann entropy as the corresponding quantum-mechanical definition. But the latter is problematic from the quantum information point of view. Consequently, we introduce a new definition of entropy that reflects the inherent uncertainty of quantum-mechanical states. We derive for it an explicit expression, and discuss some of its general properties. We distinguish between the minimum uncertainty entropy of pure states, and the excess statistical entropy of mixtures.
It is well known that a Shannon based definition of information entropy leads in the classical case to the Boltzmann definition of entropy. It is tempting to regard the Von Neumann entropy as the corresponding quantum mechanical definition. But the latter has little to do with information theory. Consequently we introduce a new definition of entropy that reflects the inherent uncertainty of quantum mechanical states. We derive for it an explicit expression, and discuss some of its general properties. We distinguish between the minimum uncertainty entropy of pure states, and the excess statistical entropy of mixtures.