The trace distance (TD) possesses several of the good properties required for a faithful distance measure in the quantum state space. Despite its importance and ubiquitous use in quantum information science, one of its questionable features, its possible non-monotonicity under taking tensor products of its arguments (NMuTP), has been hitherto unexplored. In this article we advance analytical and numerical investigations of this issue considering different classes of states living in a discrete and finite dimensional Hilbert space. Our results reveal that although this property of TD does not shows up for pure states and for some particular classes of mixed states, it is present in a non-negligible fraction of the regarded density operators. Hence, even though the percentage of quartets of states leading to the NMuTP drawback of TD and its strength decrease as the system's dimension grows, this property of TD must be taken into account before using it as a figure of merit for distinguishing mixed quantum states.
Quantum conditional entropies from convex trace functionals
Centre for Quantum Technologies, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学量子技术中心）；Department of Mathematical Sciences, University of Copenhagen（哥本哈根大学数学科学系）；Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学电气与计算机工程系）
