We give an operational definition of the quantum, classical, and total amounts of correlations in a bipartite quantum state. We argue that these quantities can be defined via the amount of work (noise) that is required to erase (destroy) the correlations: for the total correlation, we have to erase completely, for the quantum correlation we have to erase until a separable state is obtained, and the classical correlation is the maximal correlation left after erasing the quantum correlations. In particular, we show that the total amount of correlations is equal to the quantum mutual information, thus providing it with a direct operational interpretation. As a by-product, we obtain a direct, operational, and elementary proof of strong subadditivity of quantum entropy.
We give an operational definition of the quantum, classical, and total amounts of correlations in a bipartite quantum state. We argue that these quantities can be defined via the amount of work (noise) that is required to erase (destroy) the correlations: for the total correlation, we have to erase completely, for the quantum correlation we have to erase until a separable state is obtained, and the classical correlation is the maximal correlation left after erasing the quantum correlations. In particular, we show that the total amount of correlations is equal to the quantum mutual information, thus providing it with a direct operational interpretation. As a by-product, we obtain a direct, operational, and elementary proof of strong subadditivity of quantum entropy.
Insights from quantum information theory show that correlation measures based on quantum entropy are fundamental tools that reveal the entanglement structure of multipartite states. In that spirit, Groisman, Popescu, and Winter [Phys. Rev. A 72, 032317 (2005)PLRAAN1050-294710.1103/PhysRevA.72.032317] showed that the quantum mutual information I(A;B) quantifies the minimal rate of noise needed to erase the correlations in a bipartite state of quantum systems AB. Here, we investigate correlations in tripartite systems ABE. In particular, we are interested in the minimal rate of noise needed to apply to the systems AE in order to erase the correlations between A and B given the information in system E, in such a way that there is only negligible disturbance on the marginal BE. We present two such models of conditional decoupling, called deconstruction and conditional erasure cost of tripartite states ABE. Our main result is that both are equal to the conditional quantum mutual information I(A;B|E)-establishing it as an operational measure for tripartite quantum correlations.
Despite being one of the hallmarks of quantum physics, there is a lack of operational interpretations of quantum coherence. Here we provide an operational interpretation of coherence of a quantum system, in terms of the amount of noise that is to be injected in order to fully decohere it. In particular, we show that in the asymptotic limit, the minimum amount of noise that is required to fully decohere a quantum system, is equal to the relative entropy of coherence. This quantifies the erasure cost of quantum coherence. We employ the entropy exchanged between system and environment during the decohering operation and the memory required to store the information about the decohering operation as the quantifiers of noise. We show that both the quantifiers yield the same cost of erasing coherence in the asymptotic limit. The relative entropy of coherence, hence, is endowed with a thermodynamical and operational interpretation.
In this chapter, we discuss several information measures that are important for quantifying the amount of information and correlations that are present in quantum systems. The first fundamental measure that we introduce is the von Neumann entropy (or simply quantum entropy ). It is the quantum generalization of the Shannon entropy, but it captures both classical and quantum uncertainty in a quantum state.1 The quantum entropy gives meaning to the notion of an information qubit . This notion is different from that of the physical qubit, which is the description of a quantum state of an electron or a photon. The information qubit is the fundamental quantum informational unit of measure, determining how much quantum information is present in a quantum system. The initial definitions here are analogous to the classical definitions of entropy, but we soon discover a radical departure from the intuitive classical notions from the previous chapter: the conditional quantum entropy can be negative for certain quantum states. In the classical world, this negativity simply does not occur, but it takes on a special meaning in quantum information theory. Pure quantum states that are entangled have stronger-than-classical correlations and are examples of states that have negative conditional entropy. The negative of the conditional quantum entropy is so important in quantum information theory that we even have a special name for it: the coherent information. We discover that the coherent information obeys a quantum data-processing inequality, placing it on a firm footing as a particular informational measure of quantum correlations. We then define several other quantum information measures, such as quantum mutual information, that bear similar definitions as in the classical world, but with Shannon entropies replaced with quantum entropies. This replacement may seem to make quantum entropy somewhat trivial on the surface, but a simple calculation reveals that a maximally entangled state on two qubits registers two bits of quantum mutual information (recall that the largest the mutual information can be in the classical world is one bit for the case of two maximally correlated bits). We then discuss several entropy inequalities that play an important role in quantum information processing: the monotonicity of quantum relative entropy, strong subadditivity, the quantum data-processing inequalities, and continuity of quantum entropy.
On the premises that total correlations in a bipartite quantum state are measured by the quantum mutual information, and that separation of total correlations into quantum and classical parts satisfies an intuitive dominance relation, we examine to what extent various entropic entanglement measures, such as the distillable entanglement, the relative entropy entanglement, the squashed entanglement, the entanglement cost, and the entanglement of formation, can be regarded as consistent measures of quantum correlations. We illustrate that the entanglement of formation often overestimates quantum correlations and thus is too big to be a genuine measure of quantum correlations. This indicates that the entanglement of formation does not quantify the quantum correlations intrinsic to a quantum state, but rather characterizes the pure entanglement needed to build the quantum state via local operations and classical communication. Furthermore, it has the consequence that, if the additive conjecture for the entanglement of formation is true (as is widely believed), then the entanglement cost, which is an operationally defined measure of entanglement with significant physical meaning, cannot be a consistent measure of quantum correlations in the sense that it may exceed total correlations. Alternatively, if the entanglement cost is dominated by total correlations, as our intuition suggests, then we can immediately disprove the additive conjecture. Both scenarios have their counterintuitive and appealing aspects, and a natural challenge arising in this context is to prove or disprove that the entanglement cost is dominated by the quantum mutual information.
In this paper, two conjectures which were proposed in [Phys. Rev. A \textbf{82}, 052122(2010)] on the correlations in a bipartite state ρAB are studied. If the mutual information $I\Pa{\rho^{AB}}$ between two quantum systems A and B before any measurement is considered as the total amount of correlations in the state ρAB, then it can be separated into two parts: classical correlations and quantum correlations. The so-called classical correlations $C\Pa{\rho^{AB}}$ in the state ρAB, defined by the maximizing mutual information between two quantum systems A and B after von Neumann measurements on system B, we show that it is upper bounded by the von Neumann entropies of both subsystems A and B, this answered the conjecture on the classical correlation. If the quantum correlations $Q\Pa{\rho^{AB}}$ in the state ρAB is defined by $Q\Pa{\rho^{AB}}= I\Pa{\rho^{AB}} - C\Pa{\rho^{AB}}$, we show also that it is upper bounded by the von Neumann entropy of subsystem B. It is also obtained that $Q\Pa{\rho^{AB}}$ is upper bounded by the von Neumann entropy of subsystem A for a class of states.
In this paper, two conjectures which were proposed in Luo et al (2010 Phys. Rev. A 82 052122 ) on the correlations in a bipartite state ρ AB are studied. If the mutual information I (ρ AB ) between two quantum systems A and B before any measurement is considered as the total amount of correlations in the state ρ AB , then it can be separated into two parts: classical correlations and quantum correlations. The so-called classical correlations C (ρ AB ) in the state ρ AB are defined by the maximizing mutual information between two quantum systems A and B after von Neumann measurements on system B . We show that it is upper bounded by the von Neumann entropies of both subsystems A and B , which answered the conjecture on the classical correlation. If the quantum correlations Q (ρ AB ) in the state ρ AB are defined by Q (ρ AB ) = I (ρ AB ) − C (ρ AB ), we also show that it is upper bounded by the von Neumann entropy of subsystem B . It is also found that Q (ρ AB ) is upper bounded by the von Neumann entropy of subsystem A for a class of states.