Subadditivity of Von Neumann entropy Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-24
For a bipartite density operator ,
Equality holds exactly when .
For a bipartite density operator and a product reference state,
The difference between the two sides is the nonnegative quantum mutual information of .
Ideal corrected quantum teleportation transfers an input system to the receiver while preserving its entire joint density operator with an arbitrary reference. Expand a joint pure state as . Every teleportation branch acts with the same known correction on each system basis vector and does nothing to the reference vectors; undoing that correction restores the complete sum. Linearity extends the result to mixed states. The sender's measured carrier no longer retains the original reference correlations.
Trace distance Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-28
The trace distance between density operators is
Every quantum channel, including the partial trace, contracts trace distance.
For two density operators , let project onto the positive spectral subspace of . The binary POVM has output probability difference , where . Its measurement channel therefore preserves this pair's trace distance exactly. The optimizing quantum measurement depends on the pair; a single fixed measurement need not preserve every pair's distance.
Variational characterization of quantum conditional entropy Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-09-24
The quantum conditional entropy has the relative-entropy representation
where the minimum ranges over density operators on .
Every tripartite density operator satisfies . Purify to and apply Strong subadditivity of Von Neumann entropy to , conditioned on . The Schmidt decomposition gives and , proving the inequality. The original tripartite state need not be pure.