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arXiv:quant-ph/9902045 · Physical Review Letters

Classical Communication Cost of Entanglement Manipulation: Is Entanglement an Interconvertible Resource?

Hoi‐Kwong Lo, Sandu Popescu

Published Aug 16, 1999• 92 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Entanglement bits or ``ebits'' have been proposed as a quantitative measure of a fundamental resource in quantum information processing. It is, thus, important to show that the same number of ebits in different forms are interconvertible in the asymptotic limit. Here we draw attention to a very important but hitherto unnoticed aspect of entanglement manipulation---the classical communication cost. We construct an explicit procedure which demonstrates that for bipartite pure states, in the asymptotic limit, entanglement can be concentrated or diluted with vanishing classical communication cost. Entanglement of bipartite pure states is thus established as a truly interconvertible resource.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.83.1459

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Entanglement bits or ``ebits'' have been proposed as a quantitative measure of a fundamental resource in quantum information processing. It is, thus, important to show that the same number of ebits in different forms are interconvertible in the asymptotic limit. Here we draw attention to a very important but hitherto unnoticed aspect of entanglement manipulation---the classical communication cost. We construct an explicit procedure which demonstrates that for bipartite pure states, in the asymptotic limit, entanglement can be concentrated or diluted with vanishing classical communication cost. Entanglement of bipartite pure states is thus established as a truly interconvertible resource.
Suppose two distant observers, Alice and Bob, share some form of entanglement - quantum correlations - in some bipartite pure quantum states. They may apply local operations and classical communication to convert one form of entanglement to another. Since entanglement is regarded as a resource in quantum information processing, it is an important question to ask how much classical communication, which is also a resource, is needed in the inter-conversion process of entanglement. In this paper, we address this important question in the many-copy case. The inter-conversion process of entanglement is usually divided into two types: concentrating the entanglement from many partially entangled states into a smaller number of maximally entangled states (i.e., singlets) and the reverse process of diluting singlets into partially entangled states. It is known that entanglement concentration requires no classical communication, but the best prior art result for diluting to N copies of a partially entangled state requires an amount of communication on the order of /spl radic/N. Our main result is to prove that this prior art result is optimal up to a constant factor; any procedure for approximately creating N partially entangled states from singlets requires /spl Omega/(/spl radic/N) bits of classical communication. Previously not even a constant bound was known for approximate entanglement transformations. We also prove a lower bound on the inefficiency of the process: to dilute singlets to N copies of a partially entangled state, the entropy of entanglement must decrease by /spl Omega/(/spl radic/N). Moreover, we introduce two new tools - /spl delta/-significant subspaces and the standard form protocol reduction in entanglement manipulations. We hope that these two new tools will be useful in other work in quantum information theory.
We study the amount of communication needed for two parties to transform some given joint pure state into another one, either exactly or with some fidelity. Specifically, we present a method to lower bound this communication cost even when the amount of entanglement does not increase. Moreover, the bound applies even if the initial state is supplemented with unlimited entanglement in the form of EPR (Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen) pairs and the communication is allowed to be quantum mechanical. We then apply the method to the determination of the communication cost of asymptotic entanglement concentration and dilution. While concentration is known to require no communication whatsoever, the best known protocol for dilution, discovered by H.-K. Lo and S. Popescu [Phys. Rev. Lett. 83, 1459 (1999)], requires exchange of a number of bits that is of the order of the square root of the number of EPR pairs. Here we prove a matching lower bound of the same asymptotic order, demonstrating the optimality of the Lo-Popescu protocol up to a constant factor and establishing the existence of a fundamental asymmetry between the concentration and dilution tasks. We also discuss states for which the minimal communication cost is proportional to their entanglement, such as the states recently introduced in the context of ``embezzling entanglement'' (W. van Dam and P. Hayden, e-print quant-ph/0201041).
Abstract The precise quantification of the limits to manipulating quantum resources lies at the core of quantum information theory. However, standard information-theoretic analyses do not consider the actual computational complexity involved in performing certain tasks. Here we address this issue within the realm of entanglement theory, finding that accounting for computational efficiency substantially changes what can be achieved using entangled resources. We consider two key figures of merit: the computational distillable entanglement and the computational entanglement cost. These measures quantify the optimal rates of entangled bits that can be extracted from or used to dilute many identical copies of n -qubit bipartite pure states, using computationally efficient local operations and classical communication. We demonstrate that computational entanglement measures diverge considerably from their information-theoretic counterparts. Whereas the information-theoretic distillable entanglement is determined by the von Neumann entropy of the reduced state, we show that the min-entropy governs the computationally efficient setting. On the other hand, computationally efficient entanglement dilution requires maximal consumption of entangled bits, even for nearly unentangled states. Furthermore, in the worst-case scenario, even when an efficient description of the state exists and is fully known, one gains no advantage over state-agnostic protocols. Our findings establish sample-complexity bounds for measuring and testing the von Neumann entropy, fundamental limitations on efficient state compression and efficient local tomography protocols.
We prove continuity of distillable entanglement, the optimal asymptotic rate at which copies of a bipartite state can be converted into maximally entangled pairs by local operations and classical communication (LOCC) with vanishing error. We establish an explicit asymptotic continuity bound that holds for arbitrary bipartite states and depends logarithmically on the system dimension. This bound has the same structure as known continuity bounds for conditional entropy, entanglement cost, and relative entropy of entanglement. Our proof constructs an explicit LOCC protocol that converts either of two arbitrary bipartite states into the other at an ebit cost that vanishes as their trace distance tends to zero.
Entanglement of pure states of bipartite quantum systems has been shown to have a unique measure in terms of the von Neumann entropy of the reduced states of either of its subsystems. The measure is established under entanglement manipulation of an asymptotically large number of copies of the bipartite pure state. In this paper, two different asymptotic measures of entanglement for arbitrary sequences of bipartite pure states are established. These are shown to coincideonly whenthe sequence isinformation stable, in terms of the quantum spectral information rates of its corresponding sequence of subsystem states. Additional bounds on the optimal rates of entanglement manipulation protocols in quantum information theory are also presented. These include bounds given by generalizations of the coherent information bounds, Rains' bound, and the relative entropy of entanglement.