No Arabic abstract
Quantum f-divergences are a quantum generalization of the classical notion of f-divergences, and are a special case of Petz quasi-entropies. Many well known distinguishability measures of quantum states are given by, or derived from, f-divergences; special examples include the quantum relative entropy, the Renyi relative entropies, and the Chernoff and Hoeffding measures. Here we show that the quantum f-divergences are monotonic under the dual of Schwarz maps whenever the defining function is operator convex. This extends and unifies all previously known monotonicity results. We also analyze the case where the monotonicity inequality holds with equality, and extend Petz reversibility theorem for a large class of f-divergences and other distinguishability measures. We apply our findings to the problem of quantum error correction, and show that if a stochastic map preserves the pairwise distinguishability on a set of states, as measured by a suitable f-divergence, then its action can be reversed on that set by another stochastic map that can be constructed from the original one in a canonical way. We also provide an integral representation for operator convex functions on the positive half-line, which is the main ingredient in extending previously known results on the monotonicity inequality and the case of equality. We also consider some special cases where the convexity of f is sufficient for the monotonicity, and obtain the inverse Holder inequality for operators as an application. The presentation is completely self-contained and requires only standard knowledge of matrix analysis.
The quantum relative entropy is a measure of the distinguishability of two quantum states, and it is a unifying concept in quantum information theory: many information measures such as entropy, conditional entropy, mutual information, and entanglement measures can be realized from it. As such, there has been broad interest in generalizing the notion to further understand its most basic properties, one of which is the data processing inequality. The quantum f-divergence of Petz is one generalization of the quantum relative entropy, and it also leads to other relative entropies, such as the Petz--Renyi relative entropies. In this contribution, I introduce the optimized quantum f-divergence as a related generalization of quantum relative entropy. I prove that it satisfies the data processing inequality, and the method of proof relies upon the operator Jensen inequality, similar to Petzs original approach. Interestingly, the sandwiched Renyi relative entropies are particular examples of the optimized f-divergence. Thus, one benefit of this approach is that there is now a single, unified approach for establishing the data processing inequality for both the Petz--Renyi and sandwiched Renyi relative entropies, for the full range of parameters for which it is known to hold.
The typical model for measurement noise in quantum error correction is to randomly flip the binary measurement outcome. In experiments, measurements yield much richer information - e.g., continuous current values, discrete photon counts - which is then mapped into binary outcomes by discarding some of this information. In this work, we consider methods to incorporate all of this richer information, typically called soft information, into the decoding of quantum error correction codes, and in particular the surface code. We describe how to modify both the Minimum Weight Perfect Matching and Union-Find decoders to leverage soft information, and demonstrate these soft decoders outperform the standard (hard) decoders that can only access the binary measurement outcomes. Moreover, we observe that the soft decoder achieves a threshold 25% higher than any hard decoder for phenomenological noise with Gaussian soft measurement outcomes. We also introduce a soft measurement error model with amplitude damping, in which measurement time leads to a trade-off between measurement resolution and additional disturbance of the qubits. Under this model we observe that the performance of the surface code is very sensitive to the choice of the measurement time - for a distance-19 surface code, a five-fold increase in measurement time can lead to a thousand-fold increase in logical error rate. Moreover, the measurement time that minimizes the physical error rate is distinct from the one that minimizes the logical performance, pointing to the benefits of jointly optimizing the physical and quantum error correction layers.
Extensive quantum error correction is necessary in order to perform a useful computation on a noisy quantum computer. Moreover, quantum error correction must be implemented based on imperfect parity check measurements that may return incorrect outcomes or inject additional faults into the qubits. To achieve fault-tolerant error correction, Shor proposed to repeat the sequence of parity check measurements until the same outcome is observed sufficiently many times. Then, one can use this information to perform error correction. A basic implementation of this fault tolerance strategy requires $Omega(r d^2)$ parity check measurements for a distance-d code defined by r parity checks. For some specific highly structured quantum codes, Bombin has shown that single-shot fault-tolerant quantum error correction is possible using only r measurements. In this work, we demonstrate that fault-tolerant quantum error correction can be achieved using $O(d log(d))$ measurements for any code with distance $d geq Omega(n^alpha)$ for some constant $alpha > 0$. Moreover, we prove the existence of a sub-single-shot fault-tolerant quantum error correction scheme using fewer than r measurements. In some cases, the number of parity check measurements required for fault-tolerant quantum error correction is exponentially smaller than the number of parity checks defining the code.
As a continuation of the paper [20] on standard $f$-divergences, we make a systematic study of maximal $f$-divergences in general von Neumann algebras. For maximal $f$-divergences, apart from their definition based on Haagerups $L^1$-space, we present the general integral expression and the variational expression in terms of reverse tests. From these definition and expressions we prove important properties of maximal $f$-divergences, for instance, the monotonicity inequality, the joint convexity, the lower semicontinuity, and the martingale convergence. The inequality between the standard and the maximal $f$-divergences is also given.
We make a systematic study of standard $f$-divergences in general von Neumann algebras. An important ingredient of our study is to extend Kosakis variational expression of the relative entropy to an arbitary standard $f$-divergence, from which most of the important properties of standard $f$-divergences follow immediately. In a similar manner we give a comprehensive exposition on the Renyi divergence in von Neumann algebra. Some results on relative hamiltonians formerly studied by Araki and Donald are improved as a by-product.