English

Contextual Entropy and Reconstruction of Quantum States

Quantum Physics 2012-08-13 v1

Abstract

We introduce a new notion of entropy for quantum states, called contextual entropy, and show how it unifies Shannon and von Neumann entropy. The main result is that from the knowledge of the contextual entropy of a quantum state of a finite-dimensional system, one can reconstruct the quantum state, i.e., the density matrix, if the Hilbert space is of dimension 3 or greater. We present an explicit algorithm for this state reconstruction and relate our result to Gleason's theorem.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1208.2046,
  title  = {Contextual Entropy and Reconstruction of Quantum States},
  author = {Carmen Maria Constantin and Andreas Doering},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1208.2046},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

5 pages, no figures