3 research outputs found
Entropy in general physical theories
Information plays an important role in our understanding of the physical
world. We hence propose an entropic measure of information for any physical
theory that admits systems, states and measurements. In the quantum and
classical world, our measure reduces to the von Neumann and Shannon entropy
respectively. It can even be used in a quantum or classical setting where we
are only allowed to perform a limited set of operations. In a world that admits
superstrong correlations in the form of non-local boxes, our measure can be
used to analyze protocols such as superstrong random access encodings and the
violation of `information causality'. However, we also show that in such a
world no entropic measure can exhibit all properties we commonly accept in a
quantum setting. For example, there exists no`reasonable' measure of
conditional entropy that is subadditive. Finally, we prove a coding theorem for
some theories that is analogous to the quantum and classical setting, providing
us with an appealing operational interpretation.Comment: 20 pages, revtex, 7 figures, v2: Coding theorem revised, published
versio
Quantum key distribution based on orthogonal states allows secure quantum bit commitment
For more than a decade, it was believed that unconditionally secure quantum
bit commitment (QBC) is impossible. But basing on a previously proposed quantum
key distribution scheme using orthogonal states, here we build a QBC protocol
in which the density matrices of the quantum states encoding the commitment do
not satisfy a crucial condition on which the no-go proofs of QBC are based.
Thus the no-go proofs could be evaded. Our protocol is fault-tolerant and very
feasible with currently available technology. It reopens the venue for other
"post-cold-war" multi-party cryptographic protocols, e.g., quantum bit string
commitment and quantum strong coin tossing with an arbitrarily small bias. This
result also has a strong influence on the Clifton-Bub-Halvorson theorem which
suggests that quantum theory could be characterized in terms of
information-theoretic constraints.Comment: Published version plus an appendix showing how to defeat the
counterfactual attack, more references [76,77,90,118-120] cited, and other
minor change