In this paper we evaluate the entanglement assisted classical capacity of a class of quantum channels with long-term memory, which are convex combinations of memoryless channels. The memory of such channels can be considered to be given by a Markov chain which is aperiodic but not irreducible.
Many of the traditional results in information theory, such as the channel coding theorem or the source coding theorem, are restricted to scenarios where the underlying resources are independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) over a large numbe
r of uses. To overcome this limitation, two different techniques, the information spectrum method and the smooth entropy framework, have been developed independently. They are based on new entropy measures, called spectral entropy rates and smooth entropies, respectively, that generalize Shannon entropy (in the classical case) and von Neumann entropy (in the more general quantum case). Here, we show that the two techniques are closely related. More precisely, the spectral entropy rate can be seen as the asymptotic limit of the smooth entropy. Our results apply to the quantum setting and thus include the classical setting as a special case.
