We show that both information erasure process and trace process can be realized by projective measurement. And a partial trace operation consists to a projective measurement on a subsystem. We show that a nonunitary operation will destroy the wave-behavior of a particle. We give a quantum manifestation of Maxwell's demon and give a quantum manifestation of the second law of therodynamics. We show that, considering the law of memontum-energy conversation, the evolution of a closed system should be unitary and the von Neumann entropy of the closed quantum system should be least.
Losses in quantum communication lines severely affect the rates of reliable information transmission and are usually considered to be state-independent. However, the loss probability does depend on the system state in general, with the polarization dependent losses being a prominent example. Here we analyze biased trace decreasing quantum operations that assign different loss probabilities to states and introduce the concept of a generalized erasure channel. We find lower and upper bounds for the classical and quantum capacities of the generalized erasure channel as well as characterize its de…
In thermodynamics one considers thermal systems and the maximization of entropy subject to the conservation of energy. A consequence is Landauer's erasure principle, which states that the erasure of 1 bit of information requires a minimum energy cost equal to $kT\ln(2)$ where $T$ is the temperature of a thermal reservoir used in the process and $k$ is Boltzmann's constant. Jaynes, however, argued that the maximum entropy principle could be applied to any number of conserved quantities which would suggest that information erasure may have alternative costs. Indeed we showed recently that by usi…
Correlations are a valuable resource for quantum information processing and quantum thermodynamics. However, the preparation of some correlated states can carry a substantial cost that should be compared against its value. We show that classical correlations can be catalytically exploited, which enables to mitigate heat and entropy dissipation in information erasure. These correlations are naturally generated by the erasure process, and thus can be considered free. Although we also show that maximum erasure with minimum dissipation and no correlations is theoretically possible, catalysts are a…
Erasure of information stored in a quantum state requires energy cost and is inherently an irreversible operation. If quantumness of a system is physical, does erasure of quantum correlation as measured by discord also need some energy cost? Here, we show that change in quantum correlation is never larger than the total entropy change of the system and the environment. The entropy cost of erasing correlation has to be at least equal to the amount of quantum correlation erased. Hence, quantum correlation can be regarded as genuinely physical. We show that the new bound leads to the Landauer era…
We consider the generalized second law of black hole thermodynamics in the light of quantum information theory, in particular information erasure and Landauer's principle (namely, that erasure of information produces at least the equivalent amount of entropy). A small quantum system outside a black hole in the Hartle-Hawking state is studied, and the quantum system comes into thermal equilibrium with the radiation surrounding the black hole. For this scenario, we present a simple proof of the generalized second law based on quantum relative entropy. We then analyze the corresponding informatio…
We consider state changes in quantum theory due to "conditional action" and relate these to the discussion of entropy decrease due to interventions of "intelligent beings" and the principles of Szilard and Landauer/Bennett. The mathematical theory of conditional actions is a special case of the theory of "instruments" which describes changes of state due to general measurements and will therefore be briefly outlined in the present paper. As a detailed example we consider the imperfect erasure of a qubit that can also be viewed as a conditional action and will be realized by the coupling of a s…
Erasure cost of a quantum process: A thermodynamic meaning of the dynamical min-entropy
International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad（海德拉巴信息技研究院）；Center for Security, Theory and Algorithmic Research（安全、理论与算法研究中心）；Centre for Quantum Science and Technology（量子科学与技术中心）；Center for Computational Natural Sciences and Bioinformatics（计算自然科学与生物信息中心）；Harish-Chandra Research Institute（哈里什-钱德拉研究所）；Homi Bhabha National Institute（霍米·巴巴国立研究所）
Landauer's erasure principle exposes an intrinsic relation between thermodynamics and information theory: the erasure of information stored in a system, S, requires an amount of work proportional to the entropy of that system. This entropy, H(S|O), depends on the information that a given observer, O, has about S, and the work necessary to erase a system may therefore vary for different observers. Here, we consider a general setting where the information held by the observer may be quantum-mechanical, and show that an amount of work proportional to H(S|O) is still sufficient to erase S. Since t…
Landauer argued that the process of erasing the information stored in a memory device incurs an energy cost in the form of a minimum amount of mechanical work. We find, however, that this energy cost can be reduced to zero by paying a cost in angular momentum or any other conserved quantity. Erasing the memory of Maxwell's demon in this way implies that work can be extracted from a single thermal reservoir at a cost of angular momentum and an increase in total entropy. The implications of this for the second law of thermodynamics are assessed.
Quantum state engineering and quantum computation rely on information erasure procedures that, up to some fidelity, prepare a quantum object in a pure state. Such processes occur within Landauer's framework if they rely on an interaction between the object and a thermal reservoir. Landauer's principle dictates that this must dissipate a minimum quantity of heat, proportional to the entropy reduction that is incurred by the object, to the thermal reservoir. However, this lower bound is only reachable for some specific physical situations, and it is not necessarily achievable for any given reser…
We argue that a fundamental (conjectured) property of memoryless quantum channels, namely the strong superadditivity, is intimately related to the decreasing property of the quantum relative entropy. Using the latter we first give, for a wide class of input states, an estimation of the output entropy for phase damping channels and some Weyl quantum channels. Then we prove, without any input restriction, the strong superadditivity for several quantum channels, including depolarizing quantum channels, quantum-classical channels and quantum erasure channels.
The role of initial qubit-environment correlations on trace distance between two qubit states is studied in the framework of non--Markovian pure dephasing. The growth of mixedness of reduced state quantified by linear entropy is shown to be related to the degree of initial qubit--environment correlations.
Trace decreasing quantum operations naturally emerge in experiments involving postselection. However, the experiments usually focus on dynamics of the conditional output states as if the dynamics were trace preserving. Here we show that this approach leads to incorrect conclusions about the dynamics divisibility, namely, one can observe an increase in the trace distance or the system-ancilla entanglement although the trace decreasing dynamics is completely positive divisible. We propose solutions to that problem and introduce proper indicators of the information backflow and the indivisibility…
Landauer's principle states that the erasure of information generates a corresponding amount of entropy in the environment. We show that Landauer's principle provides an intuitive basis for Holevo bound on the classical capacity of a quantum channel.
It is generally accepted, following Landauer and Bennett, that the process of measurement involves no minimum entropy cost, but the erasure of information in resetting the memory register of a computer to zero requires dissipating heat into the environment. This thesis has been challenged recently in a two-part article by Earman and Norton. I review some relevant observations in the thermodynamics of computation and argue that Earman and Norton are mistaken: there is in principle no entropy cost to the acquisition of information, but the destruction of information does involve an irreducible e…
The Renyi entropy plays an essential role in quantum information theory. We study the continuity estimation of the Renyi entropy. An inequality relating the Renyi entropy difference of two quantum states to their trace norm distance is derived. This inequality is shown to be tight in the sense that equality can be attained for every prescribed value of the trace norm distance. It includes the sharp Fannes inequality for von Neumann entropy as a special case.
We derive an inequality relating the entropy difference between two quantum states to their trace norm distance, sharpening a well-known inequality due to M. Fannes. In our inequality, equality can be attained for every prescribed value of the trace norm distance.
Investigating principles for storage of quantum information at finite temperature with minimal need for active error correction is an active area of research. We bear upon this question in two-dimensional holographic conformal field theories via the quantum null energy condition (QNEC) that we have shown earlier to implement the restrictions imposed by quantum thermodynamics on such many-body systems. We study an explicit encoding of a logical qubit into two similar chirally propagating excitations of finite von-Neumann entropy on a finite temperature background whose erasure can be implemente…
In realistic stabiliser-based quantum error correction there are many ways in which real physical systems deviate from simple toy models of error. Stabiliser measurements may not always be deterministic or may suffer from erasure errors, such that they do not supply syndrome outcomes required for error correction. In this paper, we study the performance of the toric code under a model of probabilistic stabiliser measurement. We find that, even under a completely continuous model of syndrome extraction, the threshold can be maintained at reasonably high values of $1.69\%$ by suitably modifying …
Despite being one of the hallmarks of quantum physics, there is a lack of operational interpretations of quantum coherence. Here we provide an operational interpretation of coherence of a quantum system, in terms of the amount of noise that is to be injected in order to fully decohere it. In particular, we show that in the asymptotic limit, the minimum amount of noise that is required to fully decohere a quantum system, is equal to the relative entropy of coherence. This quantifies the erasure cost of quantum coherence. We employ the entropy exchanged between system and environment during the …
In the scientific and engineering literature, the second law of thermodynamics is expressed in terms of the behavior of entropy in reversible and irreversible processes. According to the prevailing statistical mechanics interpretation the entropy is viewed as a nonphysical statistical attribute, a measure of either disorder in a system, or lack of information about the system, or erasure of information collected about the system, and a plethora of analytic expressions are proposed for the various measures. In this paper, we present two expositions of thermodynamics (both 'revolutionary' in the…
Quantum Landauer's principle provides a fundamental lower bound for energy dissipation occurred with information erasure in the quantum regime. While most studies have related the entropy reduction incorporated with the erasure to the lower bound~(entropic bound), recent efforts have also provided another lower bound associated with the thermal fluctuation of the dissipated energy~(thermodynamic bound). The coexistence of the two bounds has stimulated comparative studies of their properties; however, these studies were performed for systems where the time-evolution of diagonal (population) and…
Fidelity is a fundamental and ubiquitous concept in quantum information theory. Fuchs-van de Graaf's inequalities deal with bounding fidelity from above and below. In this paper, we give a lower bound on the quantum fidelity between two states in terms of their trace-norm distance and their max-relative entropy.
We introduce a generalization of relative entropy derived from the Wigner-Yanase-Dyson entropy and give a simple, self-contained proof that it is convex. Moreover, special cases yield the joint convexity of relative entropy, and for the map (A,B) --> Tr K^* A^p K B^{1-p} Lieb's joint concavity for 0 < p < 1 and Ando's joint convexity for 1 < p < 2. This approach allows us to obtain conditions for equality in these cases, as well as conditions for equality in a number of inequalities which follow from them. These include the monotonicity under partial traces, and some Minkowski type matrix ineq…
A well-known result due to Fannes is a certain upper bound on the modulus of continuity of the von Neumann entropy with respect to the trace distance between density matrices; this distance is the maximum probability of distinguishing between the corresponding quantum states. Much more recently, Audenaert obtained an exact expression of this modulus of continuity. In the present note, Audenaert's result is extended to a broad class of entropy functions indexed by arbitrary continuous convex functions $f$ in place of the Shannon--von Neumann function $x\mapsto x\log_2x$. The proof is based on t…
We consider the following trace function on n-tuples of positive operators: Φ_p(A_1,A_2,...,A_n) = Trace (\sum_{j=1}^n A_j^p)^{1/p} and prove that it is jointly concave for 0<p\le 1 and convex for p=2. We then derive from this a Minkowski type inequality for operators on a tensor product of three Hilbert spaces, and show how this implies the strong subadditivity of quantum mechanical entropy. For p>2, Φ_p is neither convex nor concave. We conjecture that Φ_p is convex for 1<p<2, but our methods do not show this.
The aim of this work is to compute the entanglement entropy of real and virtual particles by rewriting the generating functional of $ϕ^{4}$ theory as a mean value between states and observables defined through the correlation functions. Then the von Neumann definition of entropy can be applied to these quantum states and in particular, for the partial traces taken over the internal or external degrees of freedom. This procedure can be done for each order in the perturbation expansion showing that the entanglement entropy for real and virtual particles behaves as $\ln (m_{0})$. In particular, e…
Spontaneous localisation is a falsifiable, phenomenological, mechanism for explaining the absence of macroscopic position superpositions, currently being tested for in the laboratory. The theory of trace dynamics provides a possible theoretical origin for spontaneous localisation. We have recently proposed how to employ non-commutative geometry to include gravity in trace dynamics, and suggested the emergence of classical space-time geometry via spontaneous localisation. In our theory, which we call non-commutative matter gravity, a black hole arises from the spontaneous localisation of an ent…
We prove that the classical capacity of an arbitrary quantum channel assisted by a free classical feedback channel is bounded from above by the maximum average output entropy of the quantum channel. As a consequence of this bound, we conclude that a classical feedback channel does not improve the classical capacity of a quantum erasure channel, and by taking into account energy constraints, we conclude the same for a pure-loss bosonic channel. The method for establishing the aforementioned entropy bound involves identifying an information measure having two key properties: 1) it does not incre…
We study the properties of mixed states obtained from eigenstates of many-body lattice Hamiltonians after tracing out part of the lattice. Two scenarios emerge for generic systems: (i) the diagonal entropy becomes equivalent to the thermodynamic entropy when a few sites are traced out (weak typicality); and (ii) the von Neumann (entanglement) entropy becomes equivalent to the thermodynamic entropy when a large fraction of the lattice is traced out (strong typicality). Remarkably, the results for few-body observables obtained with the reduced, diagonal, and canonical density matrices are very s…
We introduce the telescopic relative entropy (TRE), which is a new regularisation of the relative entropy related to smoothing, to overcome the problem that the relative entropy between pure states is either zero or infinity and therefore useless as a distance measure in this case. We study basic properties of this quantity, and find interesting relationships between the TRE and the trace norm distance. We then exploit the same techniques to obtain a new and shorter proof of a lower bound on the relative Renyi entropies in terms of the trace norm distance, $\traceρ^{1-p}σ^p \ge 1-(||ρ-σ||_1)/2…
The requirement that an entropy function be composable is key: it means that the entropy of a compound system can be calculated in terms of the entropy of its independent components. We prove that, under mild regularity assumptions, the only composable generalized entropy in trace form is the Tsallis one-parameter family (which contains Boltzmann-Gibbs as a particular case). This result leads to the use of generalized entropies that are not of trace form, such as Rényi's entropy, in the study of complex systems. In this direction, we also present a characterization theorem for a large class of…
Trace inequalities are general techniques with many applications in quantum information theory, often replacing classical functional calculus in noncommutative settings. The physics of quantum field theory and holography, however, motivate entropy inequalities in type III von Neumann algebras that lack a semifinite trace. The Haagerup and Kosaki $L_p$ spaces enable re-expressing trace inequalities in non-tracial von Neumann algebras. In particular, we show this for the generalized Araki-Lieb-Thirring and Golden-Thompson inequalities from (Sutter, Berta \& Tomamichel 2017). Then, using the Haag…
We prove that the quantum relative entropy decreases monotonically under the application of any positive trace-preserving linear map, for underlying separable Hilbert spaces. This answers in the affirmative a natural question that has been open for a long time, as monotonicity had previously only been shown to hold under additional assumptions, such as complete positivity or Schwarz-positivity of the adjoint map. The first step in our proof is to show monotonicity of the sandwiched Renyi divergences under positive trace-preserving maps, extending a proof of the data processing inequality by Be…
We provide a countable set of conditions based on elementary symmetric polynomials that are necessary and sufficient for a trace class integral operator to be positive semidefinite, which is an important cornerstone for quantum theory in phase-space representation. We also present a new, efficiently computable algorithm based on Newton's identities. Our test of positivity is much more sensitive than the ones given by the linear entropy and Robertson-Schrödinger's uncertainty relations; our first condition is equivalent to the non-negativity of the linear entropy.
