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Revisiting additivity violation of quantum channels

Motohisa Fukuda

Published Jan 1, 2014• 15 citations

Abstract

We prove additivity violation of minimum output entropy of quantum channels by straightforward application of ε-net argument and Lévy's lemma. The additivity conjecture was disproved initially by Hastings. Later, a proof via asymptotic geometric analysis was presented by Aubrun, Szarek and Werner, which uses Dudley's bound on Gaussian process (or Dvoretzky's theorem with Schechtman's improvement). In this paper, we develop another proof along Dvoretzky's theorem in Milman's view showing additivity violation in broader regimes than the existing proofs. Importantly, Dvoretzky's theorem works well with norms to give strong statements but these techniques can be extended to functions which have norm-like structures - positive homogeneity and triangle inequality. Then, a connection between Hastings' method and ours is also discussed. Besides, we make some comments on relations between regularized minimum output entropy and classical capacity of quantum channels.

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Physical Review Letters•Jan 1, 2008•21 citations

We prove additivity violation of minimum output entropy of quantum channels by straightforward application of ε-net argument and Lévy's lemma. The additivity conjecture was disproved initially by Hastings. Later, a proof via asymptotic geometric analysis was presented by Aubrun, Szarek and Werner, which uses Dudley's bound on Gaussian process (or Dvoretzky's theorem with Schechtman's improvement). In this paper, we develop another proof along Dvoretzky's theorem in Milman's view showing additivity violation in broader regimes than the existing proofs. Importantly, Dvoretzky's theorem works well with norms to give strong statements but these techniques can be extended to functions which have norm-like structures - positive homogeneity and triangle inequality. Then, a connection between Hastings' method and ours is also discussed. Besides, we make some comments on relations between regularized minimum output entropy and classical capacity of quantum channels.

The problem of additivity of the Minimum Output Entropy is of fundamental importance in Quantum Information Theory (QIT). It was solved by Matthew B. Hastings [“Superadditivity of communication capacity using entangled inputs”, Nature Physics 5, 255–257 (2009; doi:)] in the one-shot case by exhibiting a pair of random quantum channels. However, the initial motivation was arguably to understand regularized quantities, and there was so far no way to solve additivity questions in the regularized case. The purpose of this paper is to give a solution to this problem. Specifically, we exhibit a pair of quantum channels that unearths additivity violation of the regularized minimum output entropy. Unlike previously known results in the one-shot case, our construction is non-random, infinite-dimensional, and in the commuting-operator setup. The commuting-operator setup is equivalent to the tensor-product setup in the finite-dimensional case for this problem, but their difference in the infinite-dimensional setting has attracted substantial attention and legitimacy recently in QIT with the celebrated resolutions of Tsirelson's and Connes embedding problem [ Z. Ji et al., “ \mathsf{MIP}^*= \mathsf{RE} ”, Preprint, ], Likewise, it is not clear that our approach works in the finite-dimensional setup. Our strategy of proof relies on developing a variant of the Haagerup inequality optimized for a product of free groups.

Counterexamples to additivity of minimum output

p

-Rényi entropy of quantum channels for all

p\ge 0

The additivity of minimum output entropies is a central problem in quantum information theory. Nonadditivity is known for every Rényi order

p>1

, at the von Neumann point

p=1

, and for sufficiently small positive

p

, while much of the interval

0<p<1

has remained open. In this work, we prove that for every

p>0

there exist finite-dimensional quantum channels whose minimum output

0<p<1

-Rényi entropies violate additivity. Our proof combines two constructions: random projection-induced channels yield nonadditivity for

p>3/4

, and antisymmetric postprocessing extends the violation to all positive Rényi orders. Our estimates also improve the output-dimension bound obtained by Belinschi, Collins, and Nechita for additivity violation of minimum output von Neumann entropy.

Hastings recently reported a randomized construction of channels violating the minimum output entropy additivity conjecture. Here we revisit his argument, presenting a simplified proof. In particular, we do not resort to the exact probability distribution of the Schmidt coefficients of a random bipartite pure state, as in the original proof, but rather derive the necessary large deviation bounds by a concentration of measure argument. Furthermore, we prove non-additivity for the overwhelming majority of channels consisting of a Haar random isometry followed by partial trace over the environment, for an environment dimension much bigger than the output dimension. This makes Hastings' original reasoning clearer and extends the class of channels for which additivity can be shown to be violated.