Quantum conditional entropy ($H(A|B{)}_{\rho }$)

The quantum conditional entropy is $H(A|B{)}_{\rho }=S({\rho }_{AB})-S({\rho }_B)$. Unlike its classical counterpart, it may be negative.

For a bipartite pure state with finite Von Neumann entropy, the joint Von Neumann entropy is zero, so its quantum conditional entropy is $-S({\rho }_A)$. The Schmidt decomposition makes the nonzero eigenvalues of ${\rho }_A$ the squared Schmidt coefficients. Their Shannon entropy vanishes exactly when there is one coefficient, equivalently the joint pure state is a product state. Thus negative quantum conditional entropy detects exactly the entangled bipartite pure states; it is only a sufficient criterion for entanglement of general mixed density operators.

For bipartite density operators,This is a consequence of Strong subadditivity of Von Neumann entropy.

If $\epsilon =\Vert {\rho }_{AB}-{\sigma }_{AB}{\Vert }_1/2$ and $d_A=\dim {\mathcal{H}}_A$, thenThe proof couples the two states through their positive and negative differences, then combines concavity of quantum conditional entropy with the entropy bound for a binary mixture.

For every state on ${\mathcal{H}}_A\otimes {\mathcal{H}}_B$,The upper bound follows from Subadditivity of Von Neumann entropy and the lower bound from the Araki–Lieb inequality.