It is shown that the no-cloning theorem and the principle of no-increasing of entanglement under local actions and classical communication are equivalent and can be considered as two faces of one physical law. The result is discussed in the context of the relations between quantum and classical information.
Abstract This book deals with the basic concept of information, its importance, and the similarities and differences between classical and quantum information. First, classical information theory and its application to communication are discussed. Quantum mechanics and communication based on the laws of quantum mechanics are then considered. Quantum entanglement, a key resource in quantum communication, is analysed both from the fundamental perspective and from the perspective of its information-processing capability. This book also introduces quantum computation (in the context of the search and factorisation algorithms) and the basics of quantum error correction. Throughout this book, the connections between information theory, thermodynamics, and (quantum) physics are emphasised and discussed. Other topics covered in the book are data compression, related measures of information such as relative entropy, joint entropy, conditional entropy, and mutual information, along with the capacity of a noisy channel.
We consider transmission of classical information through a quantum channel from one sender to several receivers. In contrast to quantum information, classical information carried by two non-orthogonal states of a quantum system can be cloned exactly. This restricts a naive extrapolation of the standard no-cloning theorem. The optimal cloning induces entanglement between clones which increases with non-orthogonality of the states. The capacity of the corresponding quantum channel is considered. As a byproduct of our results, we obtain that for an entangled system with an unknown state there is no transformation which removes the entanglement totally without affecting the corresponding marginal density matrices.
Abstract Quantum mechanics is a more accurate description of the microscopic world than classical mechanics, and quantum information, which is governed by the laws of quantum mechanics, is a more accurate description of information theory. The quantum laws of physics are fundamentally different from the classical laws and so, therefore, is the resulting information processing. In one limit, quantum information reduces to classical information; otherwise, quantum information is a much more general concept that allows information-processing protocols that have no classical analogue whatsoever. This chapter discusses the basics of quantum information, some differences between bits and qubits, quantum cryptography, trace and partial-trace operations, extension of Hilbert spaces, Schmidt decomposition, generalised measurements, CP-maps and positive operator-valued measurements, and the postulates of quantum mechanics.
This thesis establishes a number of connections between foundational issues in quantum theory, and some quantum information applications. It starts with a review of quantum contextuality and non-locality, multipartite entanglement characterisation, and of a few quantum information protocols. Quantum non-locality and contextuality are shown to be essential for different implementations of quantum information protocols known as quantum random access codes and quantum communication complexity protocols. I derive sufficient experimental conditions for tests of these quantum properties. I also discuss how the distribution of quantum information through quantum cloning processes can be useful in quantum computing. Regarding entanglement characterisation, some results are obtained relating two problems, that of additivity of the relative entropy of entanglement, and that of identifying different types of tripartite entanglement in the asymptotic regime of manipulations of many copies of a given state. The thesis ends with a description of an information processing task in which a single qubit substitutes for an arbitrarily large amount of classical communication. This result is interpreted in different ways: as a gap between quantum and classical computation space complexity; as a bound on the amount of classical communication necessary to simulate entanglement; and as a basic result on hidden-variable theories for quantum mechanics. I also show that the advantage of quantum over classical communication can be established in a feasible experiment.
Information is physical. Today’s information processing and communication are classical: they are based upon the laws of Newton’s and Maxwell’s classical physics. This assertion holds all the way, from commercial computers and networks, up to their most abstract models, e.g. Turing machines. Research in quantum information was born some twenty five years ago, with the encounter of two major scientific achievements of the 20th century, namely quantum physics and information sciences. A technological motivation for that is an extrapolation of Moore’s law which seems to indicate that the amount of matter needed for one bit will be reduced to one particle sometimes before year 2020. A deeper, scientific driving force of this interdisciplinary research is that of looking for the consequences of having computation and communication based directly upon the laws of quantum physics, i.e. our current ultimate knowledge of the world of elementary particles, as described by quantum mechanics. Breakthroughs in cryptography, communications, information theory and algorithmics have shown that this transplantation from classical to quantum has far reaching consequences, both quantitative and qualitative, and opens new avenues for research within the foundations of computer science and physics. The principles 388 and most striking results and hot topics of this promising way of encoding, processing and communicating information are briefly introduced in this chapter from a mostly computer science point of view, with detailed examples in algorithmics and in cryptography. At the end of the chapter, a short list of some significant articles, textbooks and reports on quantum information are suggested for further reading.