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arXiv:quant-ph/0511082

Uncommon information (the cost of exchanging a quantum state)

Jonathan Oppenheim, Andreas Winter

Published Nov 8, 2005• 3 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

If two parties share an unknown quantum state, one can ask how much quantum communication is needed for party A to send her share to party B. Recently, it was found that the number of qubits which should be sent is given by the conditional entropy. This quantifies the notion of partial information, and it can even be negative. Here, we not only demand that A send her state to B, but additionally, B should send his state to A. Paradoxically, we find that requiring that the parties perform this additional task can lower the amount of quantum communication required. This primitive, which we call quantum state exchange, can be used to quantify the notion of uncommon information, since the two parties only need to send each other the parts of their state they don't hold in common. In the classical case, the concept of uncommon information follows trivially from the concept of partial information. We find that for quantum states, this is not so. We prove upper and lower bounds for the uncommon information and find optimal protocols for several classes of states.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.quant-ph/0511082

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If two parties share an unknown quantum state, one can ask how much quantum communication is needed for party A to send her share to party B. Recently, it was found that the number of qubits which should be sent is given by the conditional entropy. This quantifies the notion of partial information, and it can even be negative. Here, we not only demand that A send her state to B, but additionally, B should send his state to A. Paradoxically, we find that requiring that the parties perform this additional task can lower the amount of quantum communication required. This primitive, which we call quantum state exchange, can be used to quantify the notion of uncommon information, since the two parties only need to send each other the parts of their state they don't hold in common. In the classical case, the concept of uncommon information follows trivially from the concept of partial information. We find that for quantum states, this is not so. We prove upper and lower bounds for the uncommon information and find optimal protocols for several classes of states.
Recently, it was discovered that the `quantum partial information' needed to merge one party's state with another party's state is given by the conditional entropy, which can be negative [Horodecki, Oppenheim, and Winter, Nature 436, 673 (2005)]. Here we find a classical analogue of this, based on a long known relationship between entanglement and shared private correlations: namely, we consider a private distribution held between two parties, and correlated to a reference system, and ask how much secret communication is needed for one party to send her distribution to the other. We give optimal protocols for this task, and find that private information can be negative - the sender's distribution can be transferred and the potential to send future distributions in secret is gained through the distillation of a secret key. An analogue of `quantum state exchange' is also discussed and one finds cases where exchanging a distribution costs less than for one party to send it. The results give new classical protocols, and also clarify the various relationships between entanglement and privacy.
Abstract In classical information theory, channel capacity quantifies the maximum number of messages that can be reliably transmitted using shared information. An equivalent concept, termed uncommon information, represents the number of messages required to be exchanged to completely share all information in common. However, this equivalence does not extend to quantum information theory. Specifically, quantum uncommon information (QUI) is operationally defined as the minimal amount of entanglement required for the quantum communication task of quantum state exchange (QSE), where two parties exchange quantum states to share all quantum messages in common. Currently, an analytical closed-form expression for the QUI remains undetermined. In this work, by investigating underlying characterization of the QUI, we derive improved bounds on it. To obtain these bounds, we develop a subspace exchange strategy that leverages a common subspace of two parties to identify the unnecessary qubits for exchange. We also consider a referee-assisted exchange, wherein a referee aids two parties in efficiently performing the QSE. Our bounds provide more precise estimations for the QUI. Furthermore, we demonstrate that the subspace technique is a versatile tool for characterizing uncommon information not only in the bipartite scenario but also in various multi-partite ones.
Abstract In classical information theory, uncommon information refers to the amount of information that is not shared between two messages, and it admits an operational interpretation as the minimum communication cost required to exchange the messages. Extending this notion to the quantum setting, quantum uncommon information is defined as the amount of quantum information necessary to exchange two quantum states. While the value of uncommon information can be computed exactly in the classical case, no direct method is currently known for calculating its quantum analogue. Prior work has primarily focused on deriving upper and lower bounds for quantum uncommon information. In this work, we propose a new approach for estimating these bounds by utilizing the quantum Donsker–Varadhan representation and implementing a gradient-based optimization method. Our results suggest a pathway toward efficient approximation of quantum uncommon information using variational techniques grounded in quantum neural architectures.
We consider a quantum communication task between two users Alice and Bob, in which Alice and Bob exchange their respective quantum information by means of local operations and classical communication assisted by shared entanglement. Here, we assume that Alice and Bob may have quantum side information, not transferred, and classical communication is free. In this work, we derive general upper and lower bounds for the least amount of entanglement which is necessary to perfectly perform this task, called the state exchange with quantum side information. Moreover, we show that the optimal entanglement cost can be negative when Alice and Bob make use of their quantum side information. We finally provide conditions on the initial state for the state exchange with quantum side information which give the exact optimal entanglement cost.
Quantum state exchange is a quantum communication task in which two users exchange their respective quantum information in the asymptotic setting. In this paper, we consider a one-shot version of the quantum state exchange task, in which the users hold a single copy of the initial state, and they exchange their parts of the initial state by means of entanglement-assisted local operations and classical communication. We first derive lower bounds on the least amount of entanglement required for carrying out this task, and provide conditions on the initial state such that the protocol succeeds with zero entanglement cost. Based on these results, we study how the users deal with their symmetric information in order to reduce the entanglement cost. Moreover, we show that it is possible for the users to gain extra shared entanglement after this task.
We consider an unknown quantum state shared between two parties, Alice and Bob, and ask how much quantum communication is needed to transfer the full state to Bob. This problem is known as state merging and was introduced in [Horodecki et al., Nature, 436, 673 (2005)]. It has been shown that for free classical communication the minimal number of quantum bits that need to be sent from Alice to Bob is given by the conditional von Neumann entropy. However this result only holds asymptotically (in the sense that Alice and Bob share initially many identical copies of the state) and it was unclear how much quantum communication is necessary to merge a single copy. We show that the minimal amount of quantum communication needed to achieve this single-shot state merging is given by minus the smooth conditional min-entropy of Alice conditioned on the environment. This gives an operational meaning to the smooth conditional min-entropy.