Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE
General bound on the accessible information for quantum channels with noisy measurements
Kurt A. Jacobs
Abstract
Quantum systems may be used to transmit classical information. To do this the sender encodes information by preparing the system in one of an alphabet of possible states, and sends it to the receiver. The receiver then performs a measurement on the system in order to obtain information about which state was sent. Here we describe a general bound on the information which is accessible to the receiver in such a channel when the receivers measurement is noisy. In addition to extracting classical information, measurements also reduce the entropy of a quantum system. This is important, for example, in quantum feedback control. We discuss two corollaries of the information bound that involve this entropy reduction.