Hierarchy of Bounds on Accessible Information and Informational Power

TL;DR

This paper establishes a hierarchy of bounds on the accessible information in quantum systems based on their uniformity, characterized by $t$-designs, revealing a trade-off between uniformity and information capacity.

Contribution

It introduces a hierarchy of informational bounds parametrized by $t$, proving their tightness for qubits and qutrits, and shows that higher uniformity limits information to at most one bit.

Findings

Hierarchy of bounds as a function of $t$

Tightness of bounds for qubits and qutrits

Asymptotic limits showing $t$-designs contain at most one bit of information

Abstract

Quantum theory imposes fundamental limitations to the amount of information that can be carried by any quantum system. On the one hand, Holevo bound rules out the possibility to encode more information in a quantum system than in its classical counterpart, comprised of perfectly distinguishable states. On the other hand, when states are uniformly distributed in the state space, the so-called subentropy lower bound is saturated. How uniform quantum systems are can be naturally quantified by characterizing them as $t$-designs, with $t = \infty$ corresponding to the uniform distribution. Here we show the existence of a trade-off between the uniformity of a quantum system and the amount of information it can carry. To this aim, we derive a hierarchy of informational bounds as a function of $t$ and prove their tightness for qubits and qutrits. By deriving asymptotic formulae for large dimensions, we also show that the statistics generated by any $t$-design with $t > 1$ contains no more than a single bit of information, and this amount decreases with $t$. Holevo and subentropy bounds are recovered as particular cases for $t = 1$ and $t = \infty$, respectively.