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Concept
Quantum mutual information
Summary
In quantum information theory, quantum mutual information, or von Neumann mutual information, after John von Neumann, is a measure of correlation between subsystems of quantum state. It is the quantum mechanical analog of Shannon mutual information.
For simplicity, it will be assumed that all objects in the article are finite-dimensional.
The definition of quantum mutual entropy is motivated by the classical case. For a probability distribution of two variables p(x, y), the two marginal distributions are
The classical mutual information I(X:Y) is defined by
where S(q) denotes the Shannon entropy of the probability distribution q.
One can calculate directly
So the mutual information is
Where the logarithm is taken in basis 2 to obtain the mutual information in bits. But this is precisely the relative entropy between p(x, y) and p(x)p(y). In other words, if we assume the two variables x and y to be uncorrelated, mutual information is the discrepancy in uncertainty resulting from this (possibly erroneous) assumption.
It follows from the property of relative entropy that I(X:Y) ≥ 0 and equality holds if and only if p(x, y) = p(x)p(y).
The quantum mechanical counterpart of classical probability distributions are modeled with density matrices.
Consider a quantum system that can be divided into two parts, A and B, such that independent measurements can be made on either part. The state space of the entire quantum system is then the tensor product of the spaces for the two parts.
Let ρAB be a density matrix acting on states in HAB. The von Neumann entropy of a density matrix S(ρ), is the quantum mechanical analogy of the Shannon entropy.
For a probability distribution p(x,y), the marginal distributions are obtained by integrating away the variables x or y. The corresponding operation for density matrices is the partial trace. So one can assign to ρ a state on the subsystem A by
where TrB is partial trace with respect to system B. This is the reduced state of ρAB on system A.
Official source
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