A Rate-Distortion Perspective on Quantum State Redistribution
Z. B. Khanian, A. Winter
Ieee Transactions on Information Theory 72 (4), 2307-2318 (2026).
We consider a rate-distortion version of the quantum state redistribution task, where the error of the decoded state is judged via an additive distortion measure,. it thus constitutes a quantum generalisation of the classical Wyner-Ziv problem. The quantum source is described by a tripartite pure state shared between Alice (A, encoder), Bob (B, decoder) and a reference (R). Both Alice and Bob are required to output a system ( A and B , respectively), and the distortion measure is encoded in an observable on ABR . It includes as special cases most quantum rate-distortion problems considered in the past, and in particular quantum data compression with the fidelity measured per copy,. furthermore, it generalises the well-known state merging and quantum state redistribution tasks for a pure state source, with per-copy fidelity, and a variant recently considered by us, where the source is an ensemble of pure states [ZBK & AW, Proc. ISIT 2020, pp. 1864-1869 and ZBK, PhD thesis, UAB 2020, arXiv:2012.14143]. We derive a single-letter formula for the rate-distortion function of compression schemes assisted by free entanglement. A peculiarity of the formula is that in general it requires optimisation over an unbounded auxiliary register, so the rate-distortion function is not readily computable from our result, and there is a continuity issue at zero distortion. However, we show how to overcome these difficulties in certain situations.
Rate-Distortion Theory for Mixed States
Z. B. Khanian, K. Kuroiwa, D. Leung
Ieee Transactions on Information Theory 71 (2), 1077-1095 (2025).
This paper is concerned with quantum data compression of asymptotically many independent and identically distributed copies of ensembles of mixed quantum states. The encoder has access to a side information system. The figure of merit is per-copy or local error criterion. Rate-distortion theory studies the trade-off between the compression rate and the per-copy error. The optimal trade-off can be characterized by the rate-distortion function, which is the best rate given a certain distortion. In this paper, we derive the rate-distortion function of mixed-state compression. The rate-distortion functions in the entanglement-assisted and unassisted scenarios are in terms of a single-letter mutual information quantity and the regularized entanglement of purification, respectively. For the general setting where the consumption of both communication and entanglement are considered, we present the full qubit-entanglement rate region. Our compression scheme covers both blind and visible compression models (and other models in between) depending on the structure of the side information system.
Resource Theory of Heat and Work with Non-commuting Charges
Z. B. Khanian, M. N. Bera, A. Riera, M. Lewenstein, A. Winter
Annales Henri Poincare 53 (2022).
"We consider a theory of quantum thermodynamics with multiple conserved quantities (or charges). To this end, we generalize the seminal results of Sparaciari et al. (Phys. Rev. A 96:052112, 2017) to the case of multiple, in general non-commuting charges, for which we formulate a resource theory of thermodynamics of asymptotically many non-interacting systems. To every state we associate the vector of its expected charge values and its entropy, forming the phase diagram of the system. Our fundamental result is the Asymptotic Equivalence Theorem, which allows us to identify the equivalence classes of states under asymptotic approximately charge-conserving unitaries with the points of the phase diagram. Using the phase diagram of a system and its bath, we analyze the first and the second laws of thermodynamics. In particular, we show that to attain the second law, an asymptotically large bath is necessary. In the case that the bath is composed of several identical copies of the same elementary bath, we quantify exactly how large the bath has to be to permit a specified work transformation of a given system, in terms of the number of copies of the ""elementary bath "" systems per work system (bath rate). If the bath is relatively small, we show that the analysis requires an extended phase diagram exhibiting negative entropies. This corresponds to the purely quantum effect that at the end of the process, system and bath are entangled, thus permitting classically impossible transformations (unless the bath is enlarged). For a large bath, or many copies of the same elementary bath, system and bath may be left uncorrelated and we show that the optimal bath rate, as a function of how tightly the second law is attained, can be expressed in terms of the heat capacity of the bath. Our approach solves a problem from earlier investigations about how to store the different charges under optimal work extraction protocols in physically separate batteries."