UNIVERSITY OF COPENHAGEN Entropy in Quantum Information Theory { Communication and Cryptography by Christian Majenz This thesis has been submitted to the PhD School of The Faculty of Science, University of Copenhagen August 2017 Christian Majenz Department of Mathematical Sciences Universitetsparken 5 2100 Copenhagen Denmark
[email protected] PhD Thesis Date of submission: 31.05.2017 Advisor: Matthias Christandl, University of Copenhagen Assessment committee: Berfinnur Durhuus, University of Copenhagen Omar Fawzi, ENS Lyon Iordanis Kerenidis, University Paris Diderot 7 c by the author ISBN: 978-87-7078-928-8 \You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, no one really knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage." John von Neumann, to Claude Shannon Abstract Entropies have been immensely useful in information theory. In this Thesis, several results in quantum information theory are collected, most of which use entropy as the main mathematical tool. The first one concerns the von Neumann entropy. While a direct generalization of the Shannon entropy to density matrices, the von Neumann entropy behaves differently. The latter does not, for example, have the monotonicity property that the latter possesses: When adding another quantum system, the entropy can decrease. A long-standing open question is, whether there are quantum analogues of unconstrained non-Shannon type inequalities. Here, a new constrained non-von-Neumann type inequality is proven, a step towards a conjectured unconstrained inequality by Linden and Winter.