A new operational interpretation of relative entropy and trace distance between quantum states
Anurag Anshu, Rahul Jain, Priyanka Mukhopadhyay, Ala Shayeghi, Penghui Yao
Abstract
In this paper we present a new operational interpretation of relative-entropy between quantum states in the form of the following protocol. P: Alice gets to know the eigen-decomposition of a quantum state $\rho$. Bob gets to know the eigen-decomposition of a quantum state $\sigma$. Both Alice and Bob know $c= S(\rho || \sigma)$, the relative entropy between $\rho$ and $\sigma$ and an error parameter $\epsilon$. Alice and Bob use shared entanglement and after communication of $O((c +1)/\epsilon^4)$ bits from Alice to Bob, Bob ends up with a quantum state $\rho'$ such that $F(\rho, \rho') \geq 1 - \epsilon$, where $F$ represents fidelity. This result can be considered as a non-commutative generalization of a result due to Braverman and Rao [2011] where they considered the special case when $\rho$ and $\sigma$ are classical probability distributions. We use protocol P to obtain an alternate proof of a direct-sum result for entanglement assisted quantum one-way communication complexity for all relations, which was first shown by Jain, Radhakrishnan and Sen [2005, 2008]. We also present a variant of protocol in which Bob has some side information about the state with Alice. We show that in such a case, the amount of communication can be further reduced, based on the side information that Bob has. Our second result provides a new operational meaning to trace distance between quantum states in the form of a protocol which can be viewed as a quantum analogue of the classical correlated-sampling protocol, which is widely used, for example by Holenstein [2007] in his proof of a parallel-repetition theorem for two-player one-round games. Recently Dinur, Steurer and Vidick [2013] have shown another version of a quantum correlated sampling protocol different from our protocol, and used it in their proof of a parallel-repetition theorem for two-prover one-round entangled projection games.