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Test-measured R\'enyi divergences

Quantum Physics 2023-01-18 v3 Information Theory Mathematical Physics math.IT math.MP

Abstract

One possibility of defining a quantum R\'enyi α\alpha-divergence of two quantum states is to optimize the classical R\'enyi α\alpha-divergence of their post-measurement probability distributions over all possible measurements (measured R\'enyi divergence), and maybe regularize these quantities over multiple copies of the two states (regularized measured R\'enyi α\alpha-divergence). A key observation behind the theorem for the strong converse exponent of asymptotic binary quantum state discrimination is that the regularized measured R\'enyi α\alpha-divergence coincides with the sandwiched R\'enyi α\alpha-divergence when α>1\alpha>1. Moreover, it also follows from the same theorem that to achieve this, it is sufficient to consider 22-outcome measurements (tests) for any number of copies (this is somewhat surprising, as achieving the measured R\'enyi α\alpha-divergence for nn copies might require a number of measurement outcomes that diverges in nn, in general). In view of this, it seems natural to expect the same when α<1\alpha<1; however, we show that this is not the case. In fact, we show that even for commuting states (classical case) the regularized quantity attainable using 22-outcome measurements is in general strictly smaller than the R\'enyi α\alpha-divergence (which is unique in the classical case). In the general quantum case this shows that the above "regularized test-measured" R\'enyi α\alpha-divergence is not even a quantum extension of the classical R\'enyi divergence when α<1\alpha<1, in sharp contrast to the α>1\alpha>1 case.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2201.05477,
  title  = {Test-measured R\'enyi divergences},
  author = {Milán Mosonyi and Fumio Hiai},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2201.05477},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

v3: 30 pages, minor improvements. Thanks to a comment by an anonymous reviewer, we can now show that the two different ways to regularize the test-measured R\'enyi $\alpha$-divergence lead to different quantities

R2 v1 2026-06-24T08:50:11.384Z