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Abstract. The data processing inequality states that the quantum relative entropy between two states ρ and σ can never increase by applying the same quantum channel N to both states. This inequality can be strengthened with a remainder term in the form of a distance between ρ and the closest recovered state (R • N )(ρ), where R is a recovery map with the property that σ = (R • N )(σ). We show the existence of an explicit recovery map that is universal in the sense that it depends only on σ and the quantum channel N to be reversed. This result gives an alternate, information-theoretic characterization of the conditions for approximate quantum error correction.

Degradable quantum channels are an important class of completely positive trace-preserving maps. Among other properties, they offer a single-letter formula for the quantum and the private classical capacity and are characterized by the fact that a complementary channel can be obtained from the channel by applying a degrading channel. In this work we introduce the concept of approximate degradable channels, which satisfy this condition up to some finite $\varepsilon\geq0$. That is, there exists a degrading channel which upon composition with the channel is $\varepsilon$-close in the diamond norm to the complementary channel. We show that for any fixed channel the smallest such $\varepsilon$ can be efficiently determined via a semidefinite program. Moreover, these approximate degradable channels also approximately inherit all other properties of degradable channels. As an application, we derive improved upper bounds to the quantum and private classical capacity for certain channels of interest in quantum communication.Comment: v3: minor changes, published version. v2: 21 pages, 2 figures, improved bounds on the capacity for approximate degradable channels based on [arXiv:1507.07775], an author adde

Abstract:We prove several trace inequalities that extend the Golden-Thompson and the Araki-Lieb-Thirring inequality to arbitrarily many matrices. In particular, we strengthen Lieb's triple matrix inequality. As an example application of our four matrix extension of the Golden-Thompson inequality, we prove remainder terms for the monotonicity of the quantum relative entropy and strong sub-additivity of the von Neumann entropy in terms of recoverability. We find the first explicit remainder terms that are tight in the commutative case. Our proofs rely on complex interpolation theory as well as asymptotic spectral pinching, providing a transparent approach to treat generic multivariate trace inequalities.

A central question in quantum information theory is to determine how well lost information can be reconstructed. Crucially, the corresponding recovery operation should perform well without knowing the information to be reconstructed. In this work, we show that the quantum conditional mutual information measures the performance of such recovery operations. More precisely, we prove that the conditional mutual information I(A:C|B) of a tripartite quantum state ρABC can be bounded from below by its distance to the closest recovered state scriptRBfalse→BCfalse(ρABfalse), where the C-part is reconstructed from the B-part only and the recovery map scriptRBfalse→BC merely depends on ρBC. One particular application of this result implies the equivalence between two different approaches to define topological order in quantum systems.