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arXiv:quant-ph/0408130 · Quantum Information and Computation

A simple proof of the strong subadditivity inequality

Michael A. Nielsen, D�nes Petz

Published Sep 1, 2005• 65 citations
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Abstract

Arguably the deepest fact known about the von~Neumann entropy, the strong subadditivity inequality is a potent hammer in the quantum information theorist's toolkit. This short tutorial describes a simple proof of strong subadditivity due to Petz [Rep. on Math. Phys. \textbf{23} (1), 57--65 (1986)]. It assumes only knowledge of elementary linear algebra and quantum mechanics.

DOI
10.26421/qic5.6-8

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Arguably the deepest fact known about the von~Neumann entropy, the strong subadditivity inequality is a potent hammer in the quantum information theorist's toolkit. This short tutorial describes a simple proof of strong subadditivity due to Petz [Rep. on Math. Phys. \textbf{23} (1), 57--65 (1986)]. It assumes only knowledge of elementary linear algebra and quantum mechanics.
We exhibit infinitely many new, constrained inequalities for the von Neumann entropy, and show that they are independent of each other and the known inequalities obeyed by the von Neumann entropy (basically strong subadditivity). The new inequalities were proved originally by Makarychevfor the Shannon entropy, using properties of probability distributions. Our approach extends the proof of the inequalities to the quantum domain, and includes their independence for the quantum and also the classical cases.
This article presents self-contained proofs of the strong subadditivity inequality for von Neumann’s quantum entropy, S(ρ), and some related inequalities for the quantum relative entropy, most notably its convexity and its monotonicity under stochastic maps. Moreover, the approach presented here, which is based on Klein’s inequality and Lieb’s theorem that the function A→Tr eK+log A is concave, allows one to obtain conditions for equality. In the case of strong subadditivity, which states that S(ρ123)+S(ρ2)⩽S(ρ12)+S(ρ23) where the subscripts denote subsystems of a composite system, equality holds if and only if log ρ123=log ρ12−log ρ2+log ρ23. Using the fact that the Holevo bound on the accessible information in a quantum ensemble can be obtained as a consequence of the monotonicity of relative entropy, we show that equality can be attained for that bound only when the states in the ensemble commute. The article concludes with an Appendix giving a short description of Epstein’s elegant proof of Lieb’s theorem.
We prove a generalization of the strong-subadditivity (SSA) inequality in the context of finite dimensional von Neumann algebras. Our generalized SSA inequality subsumes various entropic uncertainty relations, such as the Maassen-Uffink inequality in the presence of quantum memory. Motivated by the generalization of SSA, we introduce an analog of conditional mutual information and discuss superadditivity and monotonicity under certain operations. Our proof uses complex interpolation and noncommutative mixed LpL_pLp​ spaces.