The squashed entanglement of a quantum channel is an additive function of
quantum channels, which finds application as an upper bound on the rate at
which secret key and entanglement can be generated when using a quantum channel
a large number of times in addition to unlimited classical communication. This
quantity has led to an upper bound of log((1+η)/(1−η)) on the capacity
of a pure-loss bosonic channel for such a task, where η is the average
fraction of photons that make it from the input to the output of the channel.
The purpose of the present paper is to extend these results beyond the
single-sender single-receiver setting to the more general case of a single
sender and multiple receivers (a quantum broadcast channel). We employ
multipartite generalizations of the squashed entanglement to constrain the
rates at which secret key and entanglement can be generated between any subset
of the users of such a channel, along the way developing several new properties
of these measures. We apply our results to the case of a pure-loss broadcast
channel with one sender and two receivers.Comment: 35 pages, 1 figure, accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on
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