Smooth Renyi Entropies and the Quantum Information Spectrum

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 number 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

General theory of environment-assisted entanglement distillation

We evaluate the one-shot entanglement of assistance for an arbitrary bipartite state. This yields another interesting result, namely a characterization of the one-shot distillable entanglement of a bipartite pure state. This result is shown to be stronger than that obtained by specializing the one-shot hashing bound to pure states. Finally, we show how the one-shot result yields the operational interpretation of the asymptotic entanglement of assistance proved in [Smolin et al., Phys. Rev. A 72, 052317 (2005)].Comment: 23 pages, one column, final published versio

The quantum capacity of channels with arbitrarily correlated noise

We study optimal rates for quantum communication over a single use of a channel, which itself can correspond to a finite number of uses of a channel with arbitrarily correlated noise. The corresponding capacity is often referred to as the one-shot quantum capacity. In this paper, we prove bounds on the one-shot quantum capacity of an arbitrary channel. This allows us to compute the quantum capacity of a channel with arbitrarily correlated noise, in the limit of asymptotically many uses of the channel. In the memoryless case, we explicitly show that our results reduce to known expressions for the quantum capacity.Comment: 15 pages, two columns. Final improved version - to appear in IEE

Instability of interfaces in the antiferromagnetic XXZ chain at zero temperature

For the antiferromagnetic, highly anisotropic XZ and XXZ quantum spin chains, we impose periodic boundary conditions on chains with an odd number of sites to force an interface (or kink) into the chain. We prove that the energy of the interface depends on the momentum of the state. This shows that at zero temperature the interface in such chains is not stable. This is in contrast to the ferromagnetic XXZ chain for which the existence of localized interface ground states has been proven for any amount of anisotropy in the Ising-like regime.Comment: 38 page