We develop a resource theory of symmetric distinguishability, the fundamental objects of which are elementary quantum information sources, i.e., sources that emit one of two possible quantum states with given prior probabilities. Such a source can be
represented by a classical-quantum state of a composite system $XA$, corresponding to an ensemble of two quantum states, with $X$ being classical and $A$ being quantum. We study the resource theory for two different classes of free operations: $(i)$ ${rm{CPTP}}_A$, which consists of quantum channels acting only on $A$, and $(ii)$ conditional doubly stochastic (CDS) maps acting on $XA$. We introduce the notion of symmetric distinguishability of an elementary source and prove that it is a monotone under both these classes of free operations. We study the tasks of distillation and dilution of symmetric distinguishability, both in the one-shot and asymptotic regimes. We prove that in the asymptotic regime, the optimal rate of converting one elementary source to another is equal to the ratio of their quantum Chernoff divergences, under both these classes of free operations. This imparts a new operational interpretation to the quantum Chernoff divergence. We also obtain interesting operational interpretations of the Thompson metric, in the context of the dilution of symmetric distinguishability.
We develop a framework to extend resource measures from one domain to a larger one. We find that all extensions of resource measures are bounded between two quantities that we call the minimal and maximal extensions. We discuss various applications o
f our framework. We show that any relative entropy (i.e. an additive function on pairs of quantum states that satisfies the data processing inequality) must be bounded by the min and max relative entropies. We prove that the generalized trace distance, the generalized fidelity, and the purified distance are optimal extensions. And in entanglement theory we introduce a new technique to extend pure state entanglement measures to mixed bipartite states.
We introduce an axiomatic approach to entropies and relative entropies that relies only on minimal information-theoretic axioms, namely monotonicity under mixing and data-processing as well as additivity for product distributions. We find that these
axioms induce sufficient structure to establish continuity in the interior of the probability simplex and meaningful upper and lower bounds, e.g., we find that every relative entropy must lie between the Renyi divergences of order $0$ and $infty$. We further show simple conditions for positive definiteness of such relative entropies and a characterisation in term of a variant of relative trumping. Our main result is a one-to-one correspondence between entropies and relative entropies.
The most general quantum object that can be shared between two distant parties is a bipartite channel, as it is the basic element to construct all quantum circuits. In general, bipartite channels can produce entangled states, and can be used to simul
ate quantum operations that are not local. While much effort over the last two decades has been devoted to the study of entanglement of bipartite states, very little is known about the entanglement of bipartite channels. In this work, we rigorously study the entanglement of bipartite channels as a resource theory of quantum processes. We present an infinite and complete family of measures of dynamical entanglement, which gives necessary and sufficient conditions for convertibility under local operations and classical communication. Then we focus on the dynamical resource theory where free operations are positive partial transpose (PPT) superchannels, but we do not assume that they are realized by PPT pre- and post-processing. This leads to a greater mathematical simplicity that allows us to express all resource protocols and the relevant resource measures in terms of semi-definite programs. Along the way, we generalize the negativity from states to channels, and introduce the max-logarithmic negativity, which has an operational interpretation as the exact asymptotic entanglement cost of a bipartite channel. Finally, we use the non-positive partial transpose (NPT) resource theory to derive a no-go result: it is impossible to distill entanglement out of bipartite PPT channels under any sets of free superchannels that can be used in entanglement theory. This allows us to generalize one of the long-standing open problems in quantum information - the NPT bound entanglement problem - from bipartite states to bipartite channels. It further leads us to the discovery of bound entangled POVMs.
We show that the generalization of the relative entropy of a resource from states to channels is not unique, and there are at least six such generalizations. We then show that two of these generalizations are asymptotically continuous, satisfy a vers
ion of the asymptotic equipartition property, and their regularizations appear in the power exponent of channe
Given a finite dimensional pure state transformation restricted by entanglement assisted local operations and classical communication (ELOCC), we derive minimum and maximum bounds on the entanglement of an ancillary catalyst that allows that transfor
mation. These bounds are non-trivial even when the Schmidt number of both the original and ancillary states becomes large. We identify a lower bound for the dimension of a catalyst allowing a particular ELOCC transformation. Along with these bounds, we present further constraints on ELOCC transformations by identifying restrictions on the Schmidt coefficients of the target state. In addition, an example showing the existence of qubit ELOCC transformations with multiple ranges of potential ancillary states is provided. This example reveals some additional difficulty in finding strict bounds on ELOCC transformations, even in the qubit case. Finally, a comparison of the bounds in this paper with previously discovered bounds is presented.
We show that any measure of entanglement that on pure bipartite states is given by a strictly concave function of the reduced density matrix is monogamous on pure tripartite states. This includes the important class of bipartite measures of entanglem
ent that reduce to the (von Neumann) entropy of entanglement. Moreover, we show that the convex roof extension of such measures (e.g., entanglement of formation) are monogamous also on emph{mixed} tripartite states. To prove our results, we use the definition of monogamy without inequalities, recently put forward[Gour and Guo, Quantum textbf{2}, 81 (2018)]. Our results promote the theme that monogamy of entanglement is a property of quantum entanglement and not an attribute of some particular measures of entanglement.
The von Neumann entropy of a quantum state is a central concept in physics and information theory, having a number of compelling physical interpretations. There is a certain perspective that the most fundamental notion in quantum mechanics is that of
a quantum channel, as quantum states, unitary evolutions, measurements, and discarding of quantum systems can each be regarded as certain kinds of quantum channels. Thus, an important goal is to define a consistent and meaningful notion of the entropy of a quantum channel. Motivated by the fact that the entropy of a state $rho$ can be formulated as the difference of the number of physical qubits and the relative entropy distance between $rho$ and the maximally mixed state, here we define the entropy of a channel $mathcal{N}$ as the difference of the number of physical qubits of the channel output with the relative entropy distance between $mathcal{N}$ and the completely depolarizing channel. We prove that this definition satisfies all of the axioms, recently put forward in [Gour, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 65, 5880 (2019)], required for a channel entropy function. The task of quantum channel merging, in which the goal is for the receiver to merge his share of the channel with the environments share, gives a compelling operational interpretation of the entropy of a channel. The entropy of a channel can be negative for certain channels, but this negativity has an operational interpretation in terms of the channel merging protocol. We define Renyi and min-entropies of a channel and prove that they satisfy the axioms required for a channel entropy function. Among other results, we also prove that a smoothed version of the min-entropy of a channel satisfies the asymptotic equipartition property.
We extend the definition of the conditional min-entropy from bipartite quantum states to bipartite quantum channels. We show that many of the properties of the conditional min-entropy carry over to the extended version, including an operational inter
pretation as a guessing probability when one of the subsystems is classical. We then show that the extended conditional min-entropy can be used to fully characterize when two bipartite quantum channels are related to each other via a superchannel (also known as supermap or a comb) that is acting on one of the subsystems. This relation is a pre-order that extends the definition of quantum majorization from bipartite states to bipartite channels, and can also be characterized with semidefinite programming. As a special case, our characterization provides necessary and sufficient conditions for when a set of quantum channels is related to another set of channels via a single superchannel. We discuss the applications of our results to channel discrimination, and to resource theories of quantum processes. Along the way we study channel divergences, entropy functions of quantum channels, and noise models of superchannels, including random unitary superchannels, and doubly-stochastic superchannels. For the latter we give a physical meaning as being completely-uniformity preserving.
Quantum resource theories (QRTs) offer a highly versatile and powerful framework for studying different phenomena in quantum physics. From quantum entanglement to quantum computation, resource theories can be used to quantify a desirable quantum effe
ct, develop new protocols for its detection, and identify processes that optimize its use for a given application. Particularly, QRTs revolutionize the way we think about familiar properties of physical systems like entanglement, elevating them from just being interesting from a fundamental point of view to being useful in performing practical tasks. The basic methodology of a general QRT involves partitioning all quantum states into two groups, one consisting of free states and the other consisting of resource states. Accompanying the set of free states is a collection of free quantum operations arising from natural restrictions on physical systems, and that consists of all the physical processes allowed by the resource theory and which acts invariantly on the set of free states. The QRT then studies what information processing tasks become possible using the restricted operations. Despite the large degree of freedom in how one defines the free states and free operations, unexpected similarities emerge among different QRTs in terms of resource measures and resource convertibility. As a result, objects that appear quite distinct on the surface, such as entanglement and quantum reference frames, appear to have great similarity on a deeper structural level. In this article we review the general framework of a quantum resource theory, focusing on common structural features, operational tasks, and resource measures. To illustrate these concepts, an overview is provided on some of the more commonly studied QRTs in the literature.
