Wootters' distance revisited: a new distinguishability criterium

The concept of entanglement is at the core of the theory of quantum information. In this paper a criterion for unentanglement of quantum states is proposed and proved. This criterion is natural, practical and easy to check.

Jensen-Shannon divergence is a well known multi-purpose measure of dissimilarity between probability distributions. It has been proven that the square root of this quantity is a true metric in the sense that, in addition to the basic properties of a distance, it also satisfies the triangle inequality. In this work we extend this last result to prove that in fact it is possible to derive a monoparametric family of metrics from the classical Jensen-Shannon divergence. Motivated...

A generalization of the geometric measure of quantum discord is introduced in this article, based on Hellinger distance. Our definition has virtues of computability and independence of local measurement. In addition it also does not suffer from the recently raised critiques about quantum discord. The exact result can be obtained for bipartite pure states with arbitrary levels, which is completely determined by the Schmidt decomposition. For bipartite mixed states the exact re...

The concept of antidistinguishability of quantum states has been studied to investigate foundational questions in quantum mechanics. It is also called quantum state elimination, because the goal of such a protocol is to guess which state, among finitely many chosen at random, the system is not prepared in (that is, it can be thought of as the first step in a process of elimination). Antidistinguishability has been used to investigate the reality of quantum states, ruling out ...

We present mathematical techniques for addressing two closely related questions in quantum communication theory. In particular, we give a statistically motivated derivation of the Bures-Uhlmann measure of distinguishability for density operators, and we present a simplified proof of the Holevo upper bound to the mutual information of quantum communication channels. Both derivations give rise to novel quantum measurements.

Information-theoretic measures such as relative entropy and correlation are extremely useful when modeling or analyzing the interaction of probabilistic systems. We survey the quantum generalization of 5 such measures and point out some of their commonalities and interpretations. In particular we find the application of information theory to distributional semantics useful. By modeling the distributional meaning of words as density operators rather than vectors, more of their...

The main result in this article shows that the quantum $f$-divergence of two states is equal to the classical $f$-divergence of the corresponding Nussbaum-Szko{\l}a distributions. This provides a general framework for studying certain properties of quantum entropic quantities using the corresponding classical entities. The usefulness of the main result is illustrated by obtaining several quantum $f$-divergence inequalities from their classical counterparts. All results presen...

We study metric properties of symmetric divergences on Hermitian positive definite matrices. In particular, we prove that the square root of these divergences is a distance metric. As a corollary we obtain a proof of the metric property for Quantum Jensen-Shannon-(Tsallis) divergences (parameterized by $\alpha\in [0,2]$), which in turn (for $\alpha=1$) yields a proof of the metric property of the Quantum Jensen-Shannon divergence that was conjectured by Lamberti \emph{et al.}...

We propose a generalization of the Wasserstein distance of order 1 to the quantum states of $n$ qudits. The proposal recovers the Hamming distance for the vectors of the canonical basis, and more generally the classical Wasserstein distance for quantum states diagonal in the canonical basis. The proposed distance is invariant with respect to permutations of the qudits and unitary operations acting on one qudit and is additive with respect to the tensor product. Our main resul...

We address the quantification of non-Gaussianity of states and operations in continuous-variable systems and its use in quantum information. We start by illustrating in details the properties and the relationships of two recently proposed measures of non-Gaussianity based on the Hilbert-Schmidt (HS) distance and the quantum relative entropy (QRE) between the state under examination and a reference Gaussian state. We then evaluate the non-Gaussianities of several families of n...