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Physical Review A

Lower bound for accessible information in quantum mechanics

Richard Jozsa, Daniel Robb, William K. Wootters

Published Feb 1, 1994• 159 citations
Publisher

Abstract

It has long been known that the von Neumann entropy S is an upper bound on the information one can extract from a quantum system in an unknown pure state. In this paper we define the ``subentropy'' Q, which we prove to be a lower bound on this information. Moreover, just as the von Neumann entropy is the best upper bound that depends only on the density matrix, we show that Q is the best lower bound that depends only on the density matrix. Other parallels between S and Q are also demonstrated.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.49.668

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It has long been known that the von Neumann entropy S is an upper bound on the information one can extract from a quantum system in an unknown pure state. In this paper we define the ``subentropy'' Q, which we prove to be a lower bound on this information. Moreover, just as the von Neumann entropy is the best upper bound that depends only on the density matrix, we show that Q is the best lower bound that depends only on the density matrix. Other parallels between S and Q are also demonstrated.
Subentropy is an entropy-like quantity that arises in quantum information theory; for example, it provides a tight lower bound on the accessible information for pure state ensembles, dual to the von Neumann entropy upper bound in Holevo's theorem. Here we establish a series of properties of subentropy, paralleling the well-developed analogous theory for von Neumann entropy. Further, we show that subentropy is a lower bound for min-entropy. We introduce a notion of conditional subentropy and show that it can be used to provide an upper bound for the guessing probability of any classical-quantum state of two qubits; we conjecture that the bound applies also in higher dimensions. Finally, we give an operational interpretation of subentropy within classical information theory.
An essential quantity in quantum information theory is the von Neumann entropy which depends entirely on the quantum density operator. Once known, the density operator reveals the statistics of observables in a quantum process, and the corresponding von Neumann entropy yields the full information content. However, the state, or density operator, of a given system may be unknown. Quantum state observers have been proposed to infer the unknown state of a quantum system. In this note, we show (i) that the von Neumann entropy of the state estimate produced by our quantum state observer is exponentially convergent to that of the system’s true state, and (ii) the relative entropy between the system and observer’s state converges exponentially to zero as long as the system starts in a full-rank state.
The idea that information can be localized is pervasive in physics. In thermodynamics, entropy flows from one reservoir to another, and in quantum gravity, the entropy content of some spatial regions is bounded. In quantum information theory, information is transmitted from one place to another, and entanglement can provide an advantage when there are constraints on such transmission. Shannon entropy quantifies localizable information in the sense that marginalization defines an outer measure on the set of parts of a classical multipartite system. In contrast, von Neumann entropy does not quantify localizable information in this sense. However, a variant of von Neumann entropy, which originates in noncommutative geometry, does. We prove that this adjusted von Neumann entropy is the minimum quantum entropy that quantifies localizable information. We also prove that this is the unique quantum entropy that characterizes Bell states in terms of redundant information, directly generalizing the classical case. We work with finite-dimensional C∗C^*C∗-algebras throughout, modeling finite quantum systems that may have superselection sectors.