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arXiv:quant-ph/0011072 · Proceedings of the Royal Society A Mathematical Physical and Engineering Sciences

On the reversible extraction of classical information from a quantum source

Howard Barnum, Patrick M. Hayden, Richard Jozsa, Andreas Winter

Published Jul 8, 2001• 25 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Consider a source ϵ of pure quantum states with von Neumann entropy S. By the quantum source coding theorem, arbitrarily long strings of signals may be encoded asymptotically into S qubits per signal (the Schumacher limit) in such a way that entire strings may be recovered with arbitrarily high fidelity. Suppose that classical storage is free while quantum storage is expensive and suppose that the states of ϵ do not fall into two or more orthogonal subspaces. We show that if ϵ can be compressed with arbitrarily high fidelity into A qubits per signal plus any amount of auxiliary classical storage, then A must still be at least as large as the Schumacher limit S of ϵ. Thus no part of the quantum information content of ϵ can be faithfully replaced by classical information. If the states do fall into orthogonal subspaces, then A may be less than S, but only by an amount not exceeding the amount of classical information specifying the subspace for a signal from the source.

DOI
10.1098/rspa.2001.0816

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Consider a source ϵ of pure quantum states with von Neumann entropy S. By the quantum source coding theorem, arbitrarily long strings of signals may be encoded asymptotically into S qubits per signal (the Schumacher limit) in such a way that entire strings may be recovered with arbitrarily high fidelity. Suppose that classical storage is free while quantum storage is expensive and suppose that the states of ϵ do not fall into two or more orthogonal subspaces. We show that if ϵ can be compressed with arbitrarily high fidelity into A qubits per signal plus any amount of auxiliary classical storage, then A must still be at least as large as the Schumacher limit S of ϵ. Thus no part of the quantum information content of ϵ can be faithfully replaced by classical information. If the states do fall into orthogonal subspaces, then A may be less than S, but only by an amount not exceeding the amount of classical information specifying the subspace for a signal from the source.
Consider a source of pure quantum states with density matrix ρ and von Neumann entropy S . It is known that the quantum information of the source may be faithfully compressed to 5 qubits/signal (asymptotically for long sequences) and that this limit is optimal if we demand high fidelity for long strings of signals. The usual method for achieving this compression, based on the typical subspace of the source, requires knowledge of the density matrix. We describe a new “universal” compression scheme which does not even require knowledge of ρ. More precisely, suppose that the source is known to have von Neumann entropy less than some given bound S 0 but is otherwise completely unspecified. Our method will faithfully compress the quantum information of any such source to S 0 qubits/signal. It is known that S is always less than or equal to the Shannon entropy H of the prior distribution of the source. According to Shannon’s theorem, H provides the limit for compression of classical signals, so one may ask the question: what is the physical origin of the extra compression available in the quantum case compared to the classical case (where the prior probabilities are the same)? One may suggest that this effect is a consequence of possible non-orthogonality of signal states. However we demonstrate that it is possible to make each pair of signal states of a source more parallel (keeping the prior probabilities the same) while increasing the von Neumann entropy. This casts doubt on the conventional wisdom that overlap of quantum states is a measure of their (non-)distinguishability. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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We study the visible compression of a source E={|φi〉,pi} of pure quantum signal states or, more formally, the minimal resources per signal required to represent arbitrarily long strings of signals with arbitrarily high fidelity, when the compressor is given the identity of the input state sequence as classical information. According to the quantum source coding theorem, the optimal quantum rate is the von Neumann entropy S(E) qubits per signal. We develop a refinement of this theorem in order to analyze the situation in which the states are coded into classical and quantum bits that are quantified separately. This leads to a trade-off curve Q*(R), where Q*(R) qubits per signal is the optimal quantum rate for a given classical rate of R bits per signal. Our main result is an explicit characterization of this trade-off function by a simple formula in terms of only single-signal, perfect fidelity encodings of the source. We give a thorough discussion of many further mathematical properties of our formula, including an analysis of its behavior for group covariant sources and a generalization to sources with continuously parametrized states. We also show that our result leads to a number of corollaries characterizing the trade-off between information gain and state disturbance for quantum sources. In addition, we indicate how our techniques also provide a solution to the so-called remote state preparation problem. Finally, we develop a probability-free version of our main result which may be interpreted as an answer to the question: “How many classical bits does a qubit cost?” This theorem provides a type of dual to Holevo’s theorem, insofar as the latter characterizes the cost of coding classical bits into qubits.
Suppose that a finite dimensional quantum source is known to have von Neumann entropy less than or equal to SSS but is otherwise completely unspecified. We describe a method of universal quantum data compression which will faithfully compress the quantum information of any such source to SSS qubits per signal (in the limit of large block lengths).
We inquire under what conditions some of the information in a quantum signal source, namely a set of pure states ψa emitted with probabilities p a, can be extracted in classical form by a measurement leaving the quantum system with less entropy than it had before, but retaining the ability to regenerate the source state exactly from the classical measurement result and the after-measurement state of the quantum system. We show that this can be done if and only if the source states ψa fall into two or more mutually orthogonal subsets.
A theorem is proven for quantum information theory that is analogous to the noiseless coding theorem of classical information theory. In the quantum result, the von Neumann entropy S of the density operator describing an ensemble of pure quantum signal states is equal to the number of spin-1/2 systems (``quantum bits'' or ``qubits'') necessary to represent the signal faithfully. The theorem holds whether or not the signal states are orthogonal. Related results are also presented about the fidelity of quantum coding and about representing entangled quantum states.