We show that sharing a quantum reference frame requires sharing measurement operators that identify the reference frame in addition to operators that measure its state. Observers restricted to finite resources cannot, in general, operationally determine that they share such operators. Uncertainty about whether system-identification operators are shared induces decoherence.
Secret sharing is a cryptographic discipline in which the goal is to distribute information about a secret over a set of participants in such a way that only specific authorized combinations of participants together can reconstruct the secret. Thus, secret sharing schemes are systems of variables in which it is very clearly specified which subsets have information about the secret. As such, they provide perfect model systems for information decompositions. However, following this intuition too far leads to an information decomposition with negative partial information terms, which are difficult to interpret. One possible explanation is that the partial information lattice proposed by Williams and Beer is incomplete and has to be extended to incorporate terms corresponding to higher order redundancy. These results put bounds on information decompositions that follow the partial information framework, and they hint at where the partial information lattice needs to be improved.
We develop a connection between tripartite information $I_3$, secret sharing protocols and multi-unitaries. This leads to explicit ((2,3)) threshold schemes in arbitrary dimension minimizing tripartite information $I_3$. As an application we show that Page scrambling unitaries simultaneously work for all secrets shared by Alice. Using the $I_3$-Ansatz for imperfect sharing schemes we discover examples of VIP sharing schemes.
We introduce an optimisation method for variational quantum algorithms and experimentally demonstrate a 100-fold improvement in efficiency compared to naive implementations. The effectiveness of our approach is shown by obtaining multi-dimensional energy surfaces for small molecules and a spin model. Our method solves related variational problems in parallel by exploiting the global nature of Bayesian optimisation and sharing information between different optimisers. Parallelisation makes our method ideally suited to next generation of variational problems with many physical degrees of freedom. This addresses a key challenge in scaling-up quantum algorithms towards demonstrating quantum advantage for problems of real-world interest.
We consider the problem of quantifying the information shared by a pair of random variables $X_{1},X_{2}$ about another variable $S$. We propose a new measure of shared information, called extractable shared information, that is left monotonic; that is, the information shared about $S$ is bounded from below by the information shared about $f(S)$ for any function $f$. We show that our measure leads to a new nonnegative decomposition of the mutual information $I(S;X_1X_2)$ into shared, complementary and unique components. We study properties of this decomposition and show that a left monotonic shared information is not compatible with a Blackwell interpretation of unique information. We also discuss whether it is possible to have a decomposition in which both shared and unique information are left monotonic.
The interactions between three or more random variables are often nontrivial, poorly understood, and yet, are paramount for future advances in fields such as network information theory, neuroscience, genetics and many others. In this work, we propose to analyze these interactions as different modes of information sharing. Towards this end, we introduce a novel axiomatic framework for decomposing the joint entropy, which characterizes the various ways in which random variables can share information. The key contribution of our framework is to distinguish between interdependencies where the information is shared redundantly, and synergistic interdependencies where the sharing structure exists in the whole but not between the parts. We show that our axioms determine unique formulas for all the terms of the proposed decomposition for a number of cases of interest. Moreover, we show how these results can be applied to several network information theory problems, providing a more intuitive understanding of their fundamental limits.