Min entropy
The min entropy is a conditional information measure. It is a one-shot analogue of the conditional quantum entropy.
To interpret a conditional information measure, suppose Alice and Bob were to share a bipartite quantum state . Alice has access to system A and Bob to system B. The conditional entropy measures the average uncertainty Bob has about Alice's state upon sampling from his own system. The min entropy can be interpreted as the distance of a state from a maximally entangled state.
This concept is useful in quantum cryptography, in the context of privacy amplification (See for example [1]).
Definitions
Definition: Let be a bipartite density operator on the space . The min-entropy of A conditioned on B is defined to be
where the infimum ranges over all density operators on the space . The measure is the maximum relative entropy defined as
The smooth min entropy is defined in terms of the min entropy.
where the sup and inf range over density operators which are -close to . This measure of -close is defined in terms of the purified distance
where is the fidelity measure.
These quantities can be seen as generalizations of the von Neumann entropy. Indeed, the von Neumann entropy can be expressed as
This is called the fully asymptotic equipartition theorem.[2] The smoothed entropies share many interesting properties with the von Neumann entropy. For example, the smooth min entropy is strongly subadditive[3]
Operational interpretation of smoothed min entropy
Henceforth, we shall drop the subscript from the min entropy when it is obvious from the context on what state it is evaluated.
Min-entropy as uncertainty about classical information
Suppose an agent had access to a quantum system B whose state depends on some classical variable X. Furthermore, suppose that each of its elements is distributed according to some distribution . This can be described by the following state over the system XB.
where form an orthonormal basis. We would like to know what can the agent can learn about the classical variable . Let be the probability that the agent guesses X when using an optimal measurement strategy
where is the POVM that maximizes this expression. It can be shown that this optimum can be expressed in terms of the min-entropy as
If the state is a product state i.e. for some density operators and , then there is no correlation between the systems X and B. In this case, it turns out that
Min-entropy as distance from maximally entangled state
The maximally entangled state on a bipartite system is defined as
where and form an orthonormal basis for the spaces A and B respectively. For a bipartite quantum state , we define the maximum overlap with the maximally entangled state as
where the maximum is over all CPTP operations . This is a measure of how correlated the state is. It can be shown that . If the information contained in A is classical, this reduces to the expression above for the guessing probability.
Proof of operational characterization of min-entropy
The proof is from a paper by Konig, Schaffner, Renner '08.[4] It involves the machinery of semidefinite programs,.[5] Suppose we are given some bipartite density operator . From the definition of the min-entropy, we have
This can be re-written as
subject to the conditions
We notice that the infimum is taken over compact sets and hence can be replaced by a minimum. This can then be expressed succinctly as a semidefinite program. Consider the primal problem
This primal problem can also be fully specified by the matrices where is the adjoint of the partial trace over A. The action of on operators on B can be written as
We can express the dual problem as a maximization over operators on the space AB as
Using the Choi Jamiolkowski isomorphism, we can define the channel such that
where the bell state is defined over the space AA'. This means that we can express the objective function of the dual problem as
as desired.
Notice that in the event that the system A is a partly classical state as above, then the quantity that we are after reduces to
We can interpret as a guessing strategy and this then reduces to the interpretation given above where an adversary wants to find the string given access to quantum information via system B.[6]
See also
References
- ↑ Vazirani, Umesh, and Thomas Vidick. "Fully device independent quantum key distribution." arXiv:1210.1810 (2012)
- ↑ Beaudry, Normand J., and Renato Renner. "An intuitive proof of the data processing inequality." Quantum Information & Computation 12.5-6 (2012): 432-441. arXiv:1107.0740
- ↑ Beaudry, Normand J., and Renato Renner. "An intuitive proof of the data processing inequality." Quantum Information & Computation 12.5-6 (2012): 432-441. arXiv:1107.0740
- ↑ Konig, R., Renato Renner, and Christian Schaffner. "The operational meaning of min-and max-entropy." Information Theory, IEEE Transactions on 55.9 (2009): 4337-4347. arXiv:0807.1338
- ↑ John Watrous, Theory of quantum information, Fall 2011, course notes, https://cs.uwaterloo.ca/~watrous/CS766/LectureNotes/07.pdf
- ↑ Konig, R., Renato Renner, and Christian Schaffner. "The operational meaning of min-and max-entropy." Information Theory, IEEE Transactions on 55.9 (2009): 4337-4347. arXiv:0807.1338