English

Hockey stick $f$-divergences

Quantum Physics 2026-07-09 v1 Information Theory Mathematical Physics

Abstract

In this paper we give a systematic and unified treatment and extensions of various results on a new notion of quantum ff-divergences defined from quantum hockey stick divergences, the theory of which has been developed recently in \cite{BHT_fdiv,HircheTomamichel_integral,LiuHircheCheng2025}. In particular, we consider non-normalized states and hockey stick ff-divergences defined from more general notions of quantum hockey stick divergences, as well as a somewhat more general form of the integral representation defined in terms of an additional real parameter. We also consider the extension of the theory to general von Neumann algebras, and extend various results from \cite{HircheTomamichel_integral,LiuHircheCheng2025} to this setting. Our main results here are the representation of the hockey stick ff-divergences in terms of Neyman-Pearson error probabilities, which was given in the finite-dimensional case in \cite{LiuHircheCheng2025}, an extension of Jen\v cov\'a's result \cite{Jencova2023} on the detection of reversibility of a quantum channel on a pair of states in terms of the hockey stick divergences, and an extension of a result in \cite{HircheTomamichel_integral} showing that the regularized hockey stick R\'enyi α\alpha-divergences coincide with the Petz-type R\'enyi divergences for α(0,1)\alpha\in(0,1) and with the sandwiched R\'enyi divergences for α>1\alpha>1. Moreover, we give some partial results on the characterization of when different notions of quantum ff-divergences give the same value on a pair of quantum states.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.08760,
  title  = {Hockey stick $f$-divergences},
  author = {Fumio Hiai and Milán Mosonyi and Marco Tomamichel},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.08760},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

See the concurrent and independent work https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.05195 for the extension of hockey stick $f$-divergences to von Neumann algebras