Information Content for Quantum States

It is well known that a Shannon based definition of information entropy leads in the classical case to the Boltzmann entropy. It is tempting to regard the Von Neumann entropy as the corresponding quantum mechanical definition. But the latter is problematic from quantum information point of view. Consequently we introduce a new definition of entropy that reflects the inherent uncertainty of quantum mechanical states. We derive for it an explicit expression, and discuss some of...

The novel concept of quantum logical entropy is presented and analyzed. We prove several basic properties of this entropy with regard to density matrices. We hereby motivate a different approach for the assignment of quantum entropy to density matrices.

Thermodynamic entropy is not an entirely satisfactory measure of information of a quantum state. This entropy for an unknown pure state is zero, although repeated measurements on copies of such a pure state do communicate information. In view of this, we propose a new measure for the informational entropy of a quantum state that includes information in the pure states and the thermodynamic entropy. The origin of information is explained in terms of an interplay between unitar...

This article consists of a very short introduction to classical and quantum information theory. Basic properties of the classical Shannon entropy and the quantum von Neumann entropy are described, along with related concepts such as classical and quantum relative entropy, conditional entropy, and mutual information. A few more detailed topics are considered in the quantum case.

Classical and quantum information theory are simply explained. To be more specific it is clarified why Shannon entropy is used as measure of classical information and after a brief review of quantum mechanics it is possible to demonstrate why the density matrix is the main tool of quantum information theory. Then von Neumann entropy is introduced and with its help a great difference between classical and quantum information theory is presented: quantum entanglement. Moreover ...

The present work is an introductory study about entropy its properties and its role in quantum information theory. In a next work, we will use these results to the analysis of a quantum game described by a density operator and with its entropy equal to von Neumann's.

Given the algebra of observables of a quantum system subject to selection rules, a state can be represented by different density matrices. As a result, different von Neumann entropies can be associated with the same state. Motivated by a minimality property of the von Neumann entropy of a density matrix with respect to its possible decompositions into pure states, we give a purely algebraic definition of entropy for states of an algebra of observables, thus solving the above ...

In this article we propose a quantum version of Shannon's conditional entropy. Given two density matrices $\rho$ and $\sigma$ on a finite dimensional Hilbert space and with $S(\rho)=-\tr\rho\ln\rho$ being the usual von Neumann entropy, this quantity $S(\rho|\sigma)$ is concave in $\rho$ and satisfies $0\le S(\rho|\sigma)\le S(\rho)$, a quantum analogue of Shannon's famous inequality. Thus we view $S(\rho|\sigma)$ as the entropy of $\rho$ conditioned by $\sigma$.

Logical entropy gives a measure, in the sense of measure theory, of the distinctions of a given partition of a set, an idea that can be naturally generalized to classical probability distributions. Here, we analyze how fundamental concepts of this entropy and other related definitions can be applied to the study of quantum systems, leading to the introduction of the quantum logical entropy. Moreover, we prove several properties of this entropy for generic density matrices tha...

A framework for a quantum mechanical information theory is introduced that is based entirely on density operators, and gives rise to a unified description of classical correlation and quantum entanglement. Unlike in classical (Shannon) information theory, quantum (von Neumann) conditional entropies can be negative when considering quantum entangled systems, a fact related to quantum non-separability. The possibility that negative (virtual) information can be carried by entang...