The Holevo bound is a bound on the mutual information for a given quantum encoding. In 1996 Schumacher, Westmoreland, and Wootters [Phys. Rev. Lett. 76, 3452 (1996)] derived a bound that reduces to the Holevo bound for complete measurements, but that is tighter for incomplete measurements. The most general quantum operations may be both incomplete and inefficient. Here we show that the bound derived by SWW can be further extended to obtain one that is yet again tighter for inefficient measurements. This allows us, in addition, to obtain a generalization of a bound derived by Hall, and to show that the average reduction in the von Neumann entropy during a quantum operation is concave in the initial state, for all quantum operations. This is a quantum version of the concavity of the mutual information. We also show that both this average entropy reduction and the mutual information for pure state ensembles, are Schur concave for unitarily covariant measurements; that is, for these measurements, information gain increases with initial uncertainty.
The Holevo bound is a bound the mutual information for a given quantum encoding. In 1996 Schumacher, Westmoreland and Wootters [Schumacher, Westmoreland and Wootters, Phys. Rev. Lett. 76, 3452 (1996)] derived a bound which reduces to the Holevo bound for complete measurements, but which is tighter for incomplete measurements. The most general quantum operations may be both incomplete and inefficient. Here we show that the bound derived by SWW can be further extended to obtain one which is yet again tighter for inefficient measurements. This allows us in addition to obtain a generalization of a bound derived by Hall, and to show that the average reduction in the von Neumann entropy during a quantum operation is concave in the initial state, for all quantum operations. This is a quantum version of the concavity of the mutual information. We also show that both this average entropy reduction, and the mutual information for pure state ensembles, are Schur-concave for unitarily covariant measurements; that is, for these measurements, information gain increases with initial uncertainty.
It is shown that the entropy reduction (the information gain in the initial terminology) of an efficient (ideal or pure) quantum measurement coincides with the generalized quantum mutual information of a quantum-classical channel mapping an a priori state to the corresponding posteriori probability distribution of the outcomes of the measurement. As a result the entropy reduction is defined for arbitrary a priori states (not only for states with finite von Neumann entropy) and its analytical properties is studied in detail by using general properties of the quantum mutual information. By using this approach it is shown that the entropy reduction of an efficient quantum measurement is a nonnegative lower semicontinuous concave function on the set of all a priori states having continuous restrictions to subsets on which the von Neumann entropy is continuous. Monotonicity and subadditivity of the entropy reduction are also easily proved by this method. A simple continuity condition for the entropy reduction and for the mean posteriori entropy considered as functions of a pair (a priori state, measurement) is obtained. A characterization of an irreducible measurement (in the Ozawa sense) which is not efficient is considered in the Appendix.