Narrow Results

Quantum information, though not precisely defined, is a fundamental concept of quantum information theory which predicts many fascinating phenomena and provides new physical resources. A basic problem is to recognize the features of quantum systems responsible for those phenomena. One of these important features is that non-commuting quantum states cannot be broadcast: two copies cannot be obtained out of a single copy, not even reproduced marginally on separate systems. We focus on the difference in information content between one copy and two copies, which is a basic manifestation of the gap between quantum and classical information. We show that if the chosen information measure is the Holevo quantity, the difference between the information content of one copy and two copies is zero if and only if the states can be broadcast. We propose a new approach in defining measures of quantumness of ensembles based on the difference in information content between the original ensemble and the ensemble of duplicated states. We comment on the permanence property of quantum states and the recently introduced superbroadcasting operation. We also provide an appendix where we discuss the status of quantum information in quantum physics, based on the so-called isomorphism principle.

Generalized measurement schemes on one part of bipartite states, which would leave the set of all separable states insensitive are explored here to understand quantumness of correlations in a more general perspective. This is done by employing linear maps associated with generalized projective measurements. A generalized measurement corresponds to a quantum operation mapping a density matrix to another density matrix, preserving its positivity, hermiticity, and trace class. The positive operator valued measure (POVM) — employed earlier in the literature to optimize the measures of classical/quantum correlations — correspond to completely positive (CP) maps. The other class, the not completely positive (NCP) maps, are investigated here, in the context of measurements, for the first time. It is shown that such NCP projective maps provide a new clue to the understanding of quantumness of correlations in a general setting. Especially, the separability–classicality dichotomy gets resolved only when both the classes of projective maps (CP and NCP) are incorporated as optimizing measurements. An explicit example of a separable state — exhibiting nonzero quantum discord, when possible optimizing measurements are restricted to POVMs — is reexamined with this extended scheme incorporating NCP projective maps to elucidate the power of this approach.

In [Piani et al., PRL106 (2011) 220403], an activation protocol was introduced which maps the general non-classical (multipartite) correlations between given systems into bipartite entanglement between the systems and local ancillae by means of a potentially highly entangling interaction. Here, we study how this activation protocol can be used to entangle the starting systems themselves via entanglement swapping through a measurement on the ancillae. Furthermore, we bound the relative entropy of quantumness (a naturally arising measure of non-classicality in the scheme of Piani et al. above) for a special class of separable states, the so-called classical–quantum states. In particular, we fully characterize the classical–quantum two-qubit states that are maximally non-classical.

Entanglement is one of the pillars of quantum mechanics and quantum information processing, and as a result, the quantumness of nonentangled states has typically been overlooked and unrecognized until the last decade. We give a robust definition for the classicality versus quantumness of a single multipartite quantum state, a set of states, and a protocol using quantum states. We show a variety of nonentangled (separable) states that exhibit interesting quantum properties, and we explore the “zoo” of separable states; several interesting subclasses are defined based on the diagonalizing bases of the states, and their nonclassical behavior is investigated.

We introduce a conceptually reasonable framework of quantum simultaneous noncooperative bimatrix games with naturally-behaving game referees. Although an entangling operation arranged by a game referee is so far a commonly used tool to obtain an advantage over classical counterparts in the conventional formulation of quantum games, we should recall that the classical metagame theory introduced in 1960s resolves many dilemmas without introducing a special correlated system prepared by a game referee. We introduce a quantum metagame framework with which we can eliminate dilemmas under the metalevel one for certain games, without introducing an entangling operation.