A generalization of the Entropy Power Inequality to Bosonic Quantum Systems

In most communication schemes information is transmitted via travelling modes of electromagnetic radiation. These modes are unavoidably subject to environmental noise along any physical transmission medium and the quality of the communication channel strongly depends on the minimum noise achievable at the output. For classical signals such noise can be rigorously quantified in terms of the associated Shannon entropy and it is subject to a fundamental lower bound called entropy power inequality. Electromagnetic fields are however quantum mechanical systems and then, especially in low intensity signals, the quantum nature of the information carrier cannot be neglected and many important results derived within classical information theory require non-trivial extensions to the quantum regime. Here we prove one possible generalization of the Entropy Power Inequality to quantum bosonic systems. The impact of this inequality in quantum information theory is potentially large and some relevant implications are considered in this work

The entropy power inequality for quantum systems

When two independent analog signals, X and Y are added together giving Z=X+Y, the entropy of Z, H(Z), is not a simple function of the entropies H(X) and H(Y), but rather depends on the details of X and Y's distributions. Nevertheless, the entropy power inequality (EPI), which states that exp [2H(Z)] \geq exp[2H(X)] + exp[2H(Y)], gives a very tight restriction on the entropy of Z. This inequality has found many applications in information theory and statistics. The quantum analogue of adding two random variables is the combination of two independent bosonic modes at a beam splitter. The purpose of this work is to give a detailed outline of the proof of two separate generalizations of the entropy power inequality to the quantum regime. Our proofs are similar in spirit to standard classical proofs of the EPI, but some new quantities and ideas are needed in the quantum setting. Specifically, we find a new quantum de Bruijin identity relating entropy production under diffusion to a divergence-based quantum Fisher information. Furthermore, this Fisher information exhibits certain convexity properties in the context of beam splitters.Comment: Mathematical exposition with detailed proofs. 14 pages. v2: updated to match published versio

Entropy power inequalities for qudits

Shannon's entropy power inequality (EPI) can be viewed as a statement of concavity of an entropic function of a continuous random variable under a scaled addition rule: f (√a X + √1 - aY) ≥ af(X)+(1 - a)f(Y) ∀a ∈ [0,1]. Here, X and Y are continuous random variables and the function f is either the differential entropy or the entropy power. König and Smith [IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 60(3), 1536-1548 (2014)] and De Palma, Mari, and Giovannetti [Nat. Photonics 8(12), 958-964 (2014)] obtained quantum analogues of these inequalities for continuous-variable quantum systems, where X and Y are replaced by bosonic fields and the addition rule is the action of a beam splitter with transmissivity a on those fields. In this paper, we similarly establish a class of EPI analogues for d-level quantum systems (i.e., qudits). The underlying addition rule for which these inequalities hold is given by a quantum channel that depends on the parameter a ∈ [0,1] and acts like a finite-dimensional analogue of a beam splitter with transmissivity a, converting a two-qudit product state into a single qudit state. We refer to this channel as a partial swap channel because of the particular way its output interpolates between the states of the two qudits in the input as a is changed from zero to one. We obtain analogues of Shannon's EPI, not only for the von Neumann entropy and the entropy power for the output of such channels, but also for a much larger class of functions. This class includes the Rényi entropies and the subentropy. We also prove a qudit analogue of the entropy photon number inequality (EPnI). Finally, for the subclass of partial swap channels for which one of the qudit states in the input is fixed, our EPIs and EPnI yield lower bounds on the minimum output entropy and upper bounds on the Holevo capacity.KA acknowledges support by an Odysseus Grant of the Flemish FWO. MO acknowledges financial support from European Union under project QALGO (Grant Agreement No. 600700) and by a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellowhip (ECF-2015-256)

Decoherence limit of quantum systems obeying generalized uncertainty principle: New paradigm for Tsallis thermostatistics

The generalized uncertainty principle (GUP) is a phenomenological model whose purpose is to account for a minimal length scale (e.g., Planck scale or characteristic inverse-mass scale in effective quantum description) in quantum systems. In this paper, we study possible observational effects of GUP systems in their decoherence domain. We first derive coherent states associated to GUP and unveil that in the momentum representation they coincide with Tsallis probability amplitudes, whose nonextensivity parameter q monotonically increases with the GUP deformation parameter β. Second, for β<0 (i.e., q<1), we show that, due to Bekner-Babenko inequality, the GUP is fully equivalent to information-theoretic uncertainty relations based on Tsallis-entropy-power. Finally, we invoke the maximal entropy principle known from estimation theory to reveal connection between the quasiclassical (decoherence) limit of GUP-related quantum theory and nonextensive thermostatistics of Tsallis. This might provide an exciting paradigm in a range of fields from quantum theory to analog gravity. For instance, in some quantum gravity theories, such as conformal gravity, aforementioned quasiclassical regime has relevant observational consequences. We discuss some of the implications

The conditional entropy power inequality for quantum additive noise channels

We prove the quantum conditional Entropy Power Inequality for quantum additive noise channels. This inequality lower bounds the quantum conditional entropy of the output of an additive noise channel in terms of the quantum conditional entropies of the input state and the noise when they are conditionally independent given the memory. We also show that this conditional Entropy Power Inequality is optimal in the sense that we can achieve equality asymptotically by choosing a suitable sequence of Gaussian input states. We apply the conditional Entropy Power Inequality to find an array of information-theoretic inequalities for conditional entropies which are the analogues of inequalities which have already been established in the unconditioned setting. Furthermore, we give a simple proof of the convergence rate of the quantum Ornstein-Uhlenbeck semigroup based on Entropy Power Inequalities.Comment: 26 pages; updated to match published versio

New lower bounds to the output entropy of multi-mode quantum Gaussian channels

We prove that quantum thermal Gaussian input states minimize the output entropy of the multi-mode quantum Gaussian attenuators and amplifiers that are entanglement breaking and of the multi-mode quantum Gaussian phase contravariant channels among all the input states with a given entropy. This is the first time that this property is proven for a multi-mode channel without restrictions on the input states. A striking consequence of this result is a new lower bound on the output entropy of all the multi-mode quantum Gaussian attenuators and amplifiers in terms of the input entropy. We apply this bound to determine new upper bounds to the communication rates in two different scenarios. The first is classical communication to two receivers with the quantum degraded Gaussian broadcast channel. The second is the simultaneous classical communication, quantum communication and entanglement generation or the simultaneous public classical communication, private classical communication and quantum key distribution with the Gaussian quantum-limited attenuator