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# On the properties of information gathering in quantum and classical measurements

## I Introduction

In this article we will be concerned with, among other things, the question ‘what is the capacity of a given measurement to provide information?’ In considering this question, it is important to note that for quantum measurements the answer is not unique, and depends on what the information is about. Thus, we will also be concerned with the question of how information gain can be quantified, and in doing so we will present two kinds of information gain useful for different applications. Finally, for a given measure of the information gain, we will be interested in asking what properties it has, in particular how it depends upon the observer’s initial uncertainty.

Since we will be concerned with both classical and quantum measurements, we begin in Section II by discussing the relationship between the two, and in particular how classical measurements may be described as a subset of quantum measurements, providing us with a unified description of both. In Section III we describe two physically motivated operations which can be used to combine measurements, and introduce some notation. In Section IV we discuss two kinds of information gathering, information about the initial ensemble, and information about the final state, and consider some questions regarding their respective properties under operations on measurements. In Section V we pause to consider quantifying disturbance, and discuss how one can define two measures of disturbance corresponding loosely to the two notions of information gain considered in the Section IV. In Section VI we consider the information gain regarding the initial preparation, and show that there is a precise sense in which it can be said to increase with the observer’s initial uncertainty. This motivates the definition of two classes of measurements, the permutation-symmetric measurements and the unitarily covariant measurements. Finally, we calculate the capacity of these classes to obtain information about the initial preparation.

## II Classical and Quantum Measurements

The purpose of this section is to describe the relationship between classical and quantum measurements, and discuss the special role of bare quantum measurements, the class with which we will be primarily concerned throughout. Quantum measurements Schumacher ; Kraus  are described by sets of operators, $`\{\mathrm{\Omega }_n\}`$, which satisfy $`_n\mathrm{\Omega }_n^{}\mathrm{\Omega }_n=1`$. For efficient measurements each operator in the set corresponds to a possible outcome of the measurement introMeas . (Inefficient measurements, on the other hand, are merely efficient measurements in which the result is not known with certainty - however, we will only be concerned with efficient measurements in what follows). Due to the polar decomposition theorem Schatten , we can write each of the operators $`\mathrm{\Omega }_n`$ as a product of a unitary and a positive operator. As a result, the state following a measurement may be written as

$$\rho _n=\frac{U_nQ_n\rho Q_nU_n^{}}{\text{Tr}[Q_n^2\rho ]},$$
(1)
where $`U_n`$ is a unitary, and $`Q_n`$ is positive. So long as the observer has the necessary Hamiltonian resources, she can always perform any unitary operation after the measurement, and conditional upon the result. Such an action is often referred to as feedback WM ; DJ ; Belavkin . Because of this, we can conclude two things from the above expression for the final state resulting from the outcome $`n`$. The first is that, using unitary feedback, one can simulate any quantum measurement by making a measurement whose operators $`\mathrm{\Omega }_n`$ are purely positive. The second is the converse; that, given any measurement, one can always use unitary feedback to simulate a measurement in which the operators are purely positive. However, there is a deeper significance to the polar form given in Eq.(1), but to see this we must turn to classical measurements.

Classical measurement theory, which existed, naturally, long before quantum theory, describes measurements performed on classical objects and derives directly from Bayesian statistical inference. Bayes ; Jaynes ; ABayesBook . While classical measurements are not usually written using the same formalism as quantum measurements, they can be, and this is to be expected because quantum measurements must reduce to classical measurements under certain conditions; quantum measurement theory reduces to the theory of Bayesian statistical inference when both the density matrix and the measurement operators are all diagonal in the same basis.

To describe classical measurements with the same formalism as quantum measurements, one writes the observer’s initial classical state of knowledge (being a probability density) about a classical variable $`x`$, as a positive diagonal matrix, $`\rho _\text{c}`$. Once one has done this, a classical measurement may be described by a set of positive diagonal operators $`P_n`$, such that $`_nP_n^2=1`$. The state that results from the $`n^{\text{th}}`$ outcome is

$$\rho _n=\frac{P_n\rho P_n}{\text{Tr}[P_n^2\rho ]}.$$
(2)
For an explanation of how this form is derived from the theory of Bayesian inference, the reader is referred to Ref. pool . Thus, classical measurements are described by a subset of quantum POVM’s, in which all the operators must be positive, mutually commuting and commuting with the ‘density operator’ describing the initial classical state of knowledge of the observer.

However, it is useful to note that we can add to the classical formalism deterministic transformations. In the classical case, the only deterministic operations which can be performed are permutations of the states of the random variable. In our formalism, these are implemented by multiplying the classical (diagonal) density matrix on the left and right by permutation matrices. (Permutation matrices are such that every element is zero or unity, and there is only one non-zero element in each row and column.) If we allow the observer to perform a deterministic transformation after the measurement, and conditional upon the outcome, then we have

$$\rho _n=\frac{T_nP_n\rho P_nT_n^{}}{\text{Tr}[P_n^2\rho ]}.$$
(3)
When we augment classical measurement with classical deterministic transformations, one could refer to the result as a classical operation. While Eq.(3) is sufficient for our purposes, it does not give the most general form for a classical operation. To do this one would include, in addition to the above, a stochastic map describing an irreversible randomization of the system. We note that a discussion of the relationship between quantum and classical measurements, using a different formalism, is given in Hardy .

There is now a close similarity between the above expression for classical operations, and the expression for quantum operations given in Eq.(1). In fact, this similarity is not just superficial; there is a sense in which we can think of the quantum positive operators $`Q_n`$ as characterizing the unadorned act of measurement, as the $`P_n`$ do in classical operations. To see this we consider the von Neumann entropy of the average state of the system after the measurement. Classically, if we allow only measurement, we have

$$\underset{n}{}p_n\rho _n=\underset{n}{}P_n\rho P_n=\underset{n}{}P_n^2\rho =\rho ,$$
(4)
so that the entropy of the final average state is the same as the entropy of the initial state. Denoting the difference between the initial and final entropy as

$$D_\text{o}(\rho )S\left[\underset{n}{}p_n\rho _n\right]S[\rho ],$$
(5)
(a notation which will be motivated later) then for classical measurements we have $`D_\text{o}=0`$. However, if we allow conditional deterministic transformations (feedback), then it becomes possible to arrange that $`D_\text{o}<0`$. That is, feedback allows us to reduce the final average entropy below the initial entropy, which is the essence of feedback control.

A similar result exists for quantum measurements, which is due to a theorem of Ando AndoMaj . Ando’s theorem states that for quantum measurements in which all the operators are positive ($`\mathrm{\Omega }_n=Q_n,n`$), $`D_\text{o}(\rho )0`$. In addition, when one allows the use of deterministic feedback (unitary operators), as in the classical case one can arrange that $`D_\text{o}(\rho )<0`$. This therefore provides an initial quantitative motivation for thinking of the positive operators which appear in the polar decomposition for quantum operations as the equivalent of the measurement operators in classical operations. Moreover, we expect that other relations exist in which quantum operations with positive operators parallel classical measurements, and we give a conjecture regarding a second example of such a relation in Section IV.

In view of the above argument we will refer to quantum measurements in which all the measurement operators are positive as bare measurements. An important feature of bare measurements is that, due to the Polar decomposition theorem, if one is interested purely in the process of acquiring information, it is enough to study these alone, since post-measurement unitary transformations do not affect this process. We note that such measurements have been referred to previously by various authors as, pure measurements DJJ , measurements without feedback FJ , and square root measurements Barnum .

## III Operations on measurements

It is useful at this point to introduce a few definitions. In what follows we will denote measurements by calligraphic letters. If we write,

$$\{\mathrm{\Omega }_n:n=1,\mathrm{},M\}$$
(6)
we will mean that $``$ denotes the measurement described by the operators $`\{\mathrm{\Omega }_n\}`$. The operators $`\{\mathrm{\Omega }_n\}`$ are often referred to as the Kraus operators Kraus , although in what follows we will refer to them simply as the measurement operators. We will follow Kraus’s terminology and refer to the operators $`E_n=\mathrm{\Omega }_n^{}\mathrm{\Omega }_n`$ as the effects.

There are at least two ways in which a physical procedure may be used to combine two measurements together to form a new measurement. One we will refer to as mixing mixing , and the other as concatenation.

Mixing: In this case the observer chooses between two measurements, $`\{\mathrm{\Omega }_m^{}:m=1,\mathrm{},M\}`$ and $`𝒩=\{\mathrm{\Omega }_n^𝒩:n=1,\mathrm{},N\}`$ on a random basis, choosing to use $``$ with probability $`p`$, and the other with probability $`1p`$. The resulting measurement is given by

$`𝒬`$ $`=`$ $`\{\sqrt{p}\mathrm{\Omega }_m^{}\}\{\sqrt{1p}\mathrm{\Omega }_n^𝒩\}`$ (7)
$``$ $`p+(1p)𝒩.`$ (8)
This is a kind of ‘addition’ operation for measurements.

Concatenation: In this case the observer performs two measurements, one after the other. If $``$ is made first and $`𝒩`$ second, then this is equivalent to making the single measurement $`𝒬`$, where

$`𝒬`$ $`=`$ $`\{\mathrm{\Omega }_n^𝒩\mathrm{\Omega }_m^{}:n=1,\mathrm{},N;m=1,\mathrm{},M\}`$ (9)
$``$ $`𝒩.`$ (10)
One might think of this as a kind of ‘multiplication’ operation for measurements.

## IV Two Information-Theoretic Capacities

We are interested here in quantifying the amount of information which a measurement provides about the system being measured. In classical terms one might think of concepts such as the ‘accuracy’ of a measurement, or the ‘resolving power’. It is worth noting that, in general, the amount of information that the measurement provides depends, in a way we will make precise later, on the state of the system being measured. However, in what follows we will be specifically interested in quantities which depend only on the measurement itself. Such quantities can be obtained by optimizing over the measured state, or simply by fixing it, if a natural choice exists.

The first thing to consider when speaking about the information obtained in a measurement is what this information is about. For quantum systems, there are two choices, since one can consider the information provided about the initial preparation, or the information provided about the state which results from measurement. In classical measurements there is only one choice, because these two things are the same.

One kind of information, that about the initial preparation, is useful in communicating classical information. If Alice encodes a message in a quantum system, then the ability of a measurement to extract information about the initial preparation tells us how much classical information Bob can obtain from Alice by employing the measurement. Thus, a measure of this kind of information is a classical capacity.

Alternatively, one can ask how much information one obtains about the final state - that is, the state that we are left with once we have made the measurement. How much one knows about a quantum state can be characterized by the von Neumann entropy of this state. Thus, a measure of the amount of information which the measurement extracts about a state can be obtained by taking the average decrease in the von Neumann Entropy resulting from the measurement. This motivates the definition of the purification capacity (and the related concept of the measurement strength DJJ ; FJ ). We now deal with each of these measures of information in turn.

### IV.1 Classical Capacity

There is now a considerable body of work on the capacity of quantum channels for transmitting classical information (see, e.g. Holevo73 ; SW ; Holevo98 ; Fuchs ; 3states ; Shor ; King ; HN ). Here, however, we are interested in examining the capacity of a measurement to obtain classical information encoded in a quantum state. In defining the capacity of a channel, one must maximize over all measurement strategies and encodings, in order to find the amount of information that can be communicated by the channel. To obtain the capacity of a measurement, instead one assumes a perfect channel, fixes the measurement and optimizes over all possible encodings, thus providing a quantity which characterizes the measurement rather than the channel.

In contrast to classical channels Shannon , in considering the classical capacity for quantum channels, there is a distinction between the ‘single shot’ capacity and the asymptotic capacity. The single shot capacity tells us how much classical information can be transmitted by a single use of the channel. If the channel is a single qubit being transmitted from sender to receiver, for example, then the single shot capacity tells us how much information can be obtained by measuring just the one qubit. The asymptotic capacity is the amount of information that can be transmitted, per qubit, if we are allowed to measure multiple qubits, in the limit of an infinity number of qubits. In general, the asymptotic capacity is greater than the single shot capacity Sup1 ; Sup2 ; Sup3 . However, King and Ruskai ProdCap  have recently shown that this is only true if joint measurements are made across multiple uses of the channel. Thus, as a property of a measurement on a single system, the notion of classical capacity is well defined without reference to the number of systems being measured.

The amount of classical information that is provided by a measurement, $``$, about an encoding, $`\epsilon `$, and which we will denote by $`\mathrm{\Delta }I_\text{i}(,\epsilon )`$, is the mutual information between the encoding and the output results. An encoding is the set of states chosen as the alphabet with which to write the information, along with the probability with which each state will be selected. We will denote an element of the set of all possible encodings by $`\epsilon `$, and the set of states and probabilities corresponding to this encoding as $`\{\rho _i:i=1,\mathrm{}n\}`$, and $`\{P(i):i=1,\mathrm{}n\}`$, respectively. The state of the prepared system from the point of view of the observer making the measurement is $`\rho =_iP(i)\rho _i`$. With these definitions, the information provided by the measurement is given by

$$\mathrm{\Delta }I_\text{i}(,\epsilon )=H[P(i)]\underset{j}{}Q(j)H[P(i|j)],$$
(11)
where

$$Q(j)=\text{Tr}[\mathrm{\Omega }_j^{}\mathrm{\Omega }_j\rho ]$$
(12)
is the a priori probability density of the output results,

$$P(i|j)=\frac{\text{Tr}[\mathrm{\Omega }_j^{}\mathrm{\Omega }_j\rho _i]P(i)}{_i\text{Tr}[\mathrm{\Omega }_j^{}\mathrm{\Omega }_j\rho _i]P(i)}=\frac{Q(j|i)P(i)}{_iQ(j|i)P(i)}$$
(13)
is the observer’s state of knowledge of the initial preparation on receiving the outcome $`j`$, and $`H`$ is the entropy. The quantity $`Q(j|i)`$ introduced above is the probability density of the output results given that the initial state is $`\rho _i`$. We will continue to use this notation throughout; that is, we will denote the probability densities of the initial states by $`P`$, and the densities of outcomes by $`Q`$. Note that the mutual information is simply the average reduction in the entropy of the distribution of the initial preparation, $`P(i)`$, due to the measurement. It is useful to note that the mutual information can also be written in the reverse form with input $`i`$ and output $`j`$ swapped. That is

$$\mathrm{\Delta }I_\text{i}(,\epsilon )=H[Q(j)]\underset{i}{}P(i)H[Q(j|i)].$$
(14)
Naturally the classical capacity of a measurement should be defined as the supremum of $`\mathrm{\Delta }I_\text{i}(,\epsilon )`$ over all initial encoding, and is therefore given by

$$C()=\underset{\epsilon }{sup}\mathrm{\Delta }I_\text{i}(,\epsilon ).$$
(15)
It is natural now to ask how $`C`$ behaves under the operations of mixing and concatenation. For mixing it is clear that

$$C(p+(1p)𝒩)pC()+(1p)C(𝒩).$$
(16)
This is because, since the observer chooses between measurements $``$ and $`𝒩`$ on a random basis, the preparer cannot know which measurement will be used, and therefore must use the same encoding irrespective of the measurement made. If the optimal encoding for both measurements is the same, then we have equality. Otherwise one measurement necessarily extracts less information than is optimal, hence the inequality.

The behavior under concatenation is straightforward to obtain for classical measurements. If we denote the mutual information between two sets of random variables $`X`$ and $`Y`$ as $`M(X,Y)`$, then the capacity of the concatenated measurement is the supremum of $`M(i|j,k)`$ over initial encodings, where $`i`$ labels the elements of the encoding, and $`j`$ and $`k`$ label the outcomes for the respective measurements $``$ and $`𝒩`$. Rearranging the expression for $`M(i|j,k)`$, one finds that

$$M(i|j,k)=M(i|j)+M(i|k)M(j|k).$$
(17)
The point here is that, while two measurements may be independent, the outcomes of the measurements, when made in sequence on the same system, are not, in general, uncorrelated. Since $`M(j|k)0`$, we have $`M(i|j,k)M(i|j)+M(i|k)`$. Since the classical capacity of $``$ and $`𝒩`$ are the respective supremums of $`M(i|j)`$ and $`M(i|k)`$ over initial encodings, we have

$`C(𝒩)`$ $`=`$ $`\underset{\epsilon }{sup}M(i|j,k)`$ (18)
$``$ $`\underset{\epsilon ^{}}{sup}[M(i|j)+M(i|k)]`$
$``$ $`\underset{\epsilon ^{}}{sup}M(i|j)+\underset{\epsilon ^{\prime \prime }}{sup}M(i|k)]`$
$`=`$ $`C()+C(𝒩).`$
The first inequality is only saturated when $`M(j|k)=0`$ and the second is only saturated when the optimal encoding is the same for both measurements.

For quantum measurements at first it is tempting to suggest that $`C`$ might also be subadditive. However, if we allow all classes of measurements, in particular measurements in which the operators $`\mathrm{\Omega }_n`$ are not purely positive, but have a unitary component, then it is not hard to find examples which break the inequality. That is,

$$,𝒩,C(𝒩)>C()+C(𝒩).$$
(19)
Nevertheless, it is important to point out that the same can be said for the mutual information for classical operations if we allow conditional deterministic transformations. As a result we are prepared to conjecture that for bare measurements the purification capacity satisfies the classical relation, Eq.(18).

### IV.2 Purification Capacity

While the classical capacity was motivated by considering the transmission of classical information, the purification capacity is motivated by considering the problem of state preparation and more generally quantum feedback control DJJ ; FJ . In this case, instead of being interested in the amount of information one obtains about the initial preparation, one is interested in how well one knows the final state that results from the measurement. This is because the more pure the final state, the more one can subsequently control the system. That is, one is interested in the amount by which, on average, the measurement purifies the state of the system.

For the purposes of control, the von Neumann entropy is a sensible measure of the observer’s uncertainty of a state, since it measures the minimum possible entropy of the outcomes of a future measurement. That is, if the observer has the ability to perform any measurement, the von Neumann entropy measures the unavoidable residual unpredictability of the measurement result. The outcome of a measurement on a state with zero von Neumann entropy can, in the best case, be predicted perfectly.

To characterize the amount of information that a measurement provides about the final state one can therefore average the von Neumann entropies of all the possible final states over the measurement outcomes. Subtracting this from the von Neumann entropy of the initial state gives us a measure of the increase in the observer’s information about the state of the system provided by the measurement:

$$\mathrm{\Delta }I_f(,\rho )=S(\rho )\underset{i}{}P(i)S(\rho _i),$$
(20)
where $``$ is the measurement and $`\rho `$ is the initial state. Nielsen has shown that, as one would intuitively expect, $`\mathrm{\Delta }I_f`$ is non-negative Nielsen . (See also FJ  for a remarkably simple proof of the this result discovered by Fuchs.)

In order to obtain a quantity which depends only on the measurement, two possibilities are to fix the initial state, or to maximize $`\mathrm{\Delta }I_f`$ over all possible initial states. If we choose the second option, then we have a quantity which is the final-state equivalent of the classical capacity. We will refer to this as the purification capacity, and denote it by $`K`$. Thus we define

$$K()=\underset{\rho }{sup}\mathrm{\Delta }I_f(,\rho ).$$
(21)
If instead we wish to fix the initial state, which was the procedure adopted in DJJ , then it is important to choose a state which is invariant under unitary transformations, so that the resulting quantity, which was referred to in DJJ  as the measurement strength, satisfies the intuitive notion that it should be invariant under unitary transformations of the measurement. In Refs. DJJ ; FJ  the measurement strength, which we will denote by $`K_I`$, was defined by fixing the initial state to be the maximal uncertainty state $`\rho =I/N`$. This gives

$$K_I()=\mathrm{ln}(N)\underset{n}{}P_nS[\stackrel{~}{E_n}],$$
(22)
where $`\stackrel{~}{E_n}=E_n/\text{Tr}[E_n]`$, and we have used the fact that the eigenvalues of $`\mathrm{\Omega }_n\mathrm{\Omega }_n^{}`$ are the same as those of $`E_n`$ MO ; AndoMaj . By the definition of $`K`$ we have $`K_I()K()`$.

It is now natural to ask how the purification capacity and the measurement strength behave under the operations of mixing and concatenation. Under mixing one has trivially that $`K_I`$ is linear, ie.

$$K_I(p+(1p)𝒩)=pK_I()+(1p)K_I(𝒩),$$
(23)
and that $`K`$ is concave:

$$K(p+(1p)𝒩)pK_I()+(1p)K_I(𝒩).$$
(24)
While it is not immediately obvious, for bare measurements $`K_I`$ is invariant under a change in the order in which measurements are concatenated. That is,

$$K_I(𝒩)=K_I(𝒩),,𝒩,$$
(25)
where $``$ denotes the set of all bare measurements. This follows almost immediately from the fact that, for any two operators $`A`$ and $`B`$, $`AB`$ has the same eigenvalues as $`BA`$ MO ; AndoMaj .

For general quantum measurements, it is not hard to show that neither the measurement strength nor the purification capacity satisfy the classical relation, given by Eq.(18) (Note that for classical measurements $`K=C`$.) However, we conjecture that for bare measurements both the strength and purification capacity satisfy the classical relation, e.g.

$$K(𝒩)K()+K(𝒩),,𝒩.$$
(26)
## V Two Measures of Disturbance

Although disturbance is not the primary focus of this article, we feel that it is worth pointing out here that, corresponding to the two measures of information discussed in the previous section, there are two natural information-theoretic measures of the disturbance caused by a measurement. The first, which we might refer to as disturbance to the input, measures the amount by which classical information encoded in a quantum state is degraded by a measurement. That is, it tells how much less classical information we can extract from the system about the initial preparation after having made the measurement. For this purpose we will assume that the observer who wishes to extract the information does not have access to the results of the disturbing measurement. The reason for using this definition is that it results in a sharp contrast between classical and quantum measurements; for classical measurements this disturbance is zero, but can be non-zero for quantum measurements.

The second kind of disturbance, which we might refer to as disturbance to the output, is the difference between the entropy of the initial state, and the entropy of the state given by averaging all the final states. This measures the amount of noise that the measurement is feeding into the system. This is understood most easily by thinking of a noise-driven classical system. The random changes that the quantum system experiences as a result of the random outcomes of the measurement are like the random kicks experienced by a classical system under the influence of a noisy force. The strength of this noise can be characterized by the entropy increase of the probability distribution for the state of the system given that the observer has no knowledge of which kick will occur. This quantum measure of disturbance is simply the equivalent calculation for a quantum system. This kind of disturbance is relevant for quantum feedback control, and was considered in DJJ ; FJ . The disturbance caused by a classical measurement under this definition is zero, whereas, for bare quantum measurements, it is greater than or equal to zero AndoMaj . Thus, both measures provide a precise concept of the general notion that quantum measurements can produce a disturbance folkL , whereas classical measurements do not.

Note that the definitions of disturbance which have been most studied in the literature to date, for example in the work by Fuchs FuchsDist , Banaszek Banaszek  and Barnum Barnum , characterize disturbance to the input. It is therefore our first measure which is most closely related to these notions of disturbance.

### V.1 Disturbance to the Input

Given an encoding, $`\epsilon `$, the optimal amount of information which an observer Alice can obtain about a message encoded by Bob using that encoding is called the accessible information AccessInfo . If a third observer, Eve, makes a measurement, $``$, on the system in which the information is encoded, and does not relay the result of the measurement to the Alice, then from the point of view of the first observer the state of the system is transformed by

$$\rho \rho ^{}=\underset{n}{}\mathrm{\Omega }_n\rho \mathrm{\Omega }_n^{},$$
(27)
where the $`\mathrm{\Omega }_n`$ are the measurement operators for $``$. As a result, the encoding is transformed from $`\epsilon `$ to $`\epsilon ^{}`$ where

$$\epsilon ^{}=\{p_i,\underset{n}{}\mathrm{\Omega }_n\rho _i\mathrm{\Omega }_n^{}:i=1,\mathrm{},N\}.$$
(28)
The disturbance caused by the measurement $``$ to the ensemble $`\epsilon `$ can then be characterized by the difference between the accessible information of $`\epsilon `$ and that of $`\epsilon ^{}`$, which we can write as

$$D_\text{i}(\epsilon )=I_{\text{access}}(\epsilon )I_{\text{access}}(\epsilon ^{}).$$
(29)
To obtain a measure of disturbance which characterizes the measurement alone, we can do one of at least two things. The first is simply to choose $`\epsilon `$ to the be the optimal encoding for a perfect channel, which, for an $`N`$-dimensional system, is an $`N`$\- dimensional orthonormal basis. In this case the first term is simply the capacity of the perfect $`N`$-dimensional quantum channel. The second term, however, is not the maximal amount of information which can be transmitted from Alice to Bob given that Eve makes the measurement $``$, since the optimal encoding $`\epsilon `$ for the perfect channel, may not be the optimal encoding for the channel described by the measurement operators $`\mathrm{\Omega }_n`$. Thus, a second approach to characterizing the disturbance of the measurement is to choose the second term in the expression for $`D_\text{i}(\epsilon )`$ to be the accessible information when $`\epsilon ^{}`$ is such as to make this optimal. The result is simply the single shot capacity of the channel described by the measurement operators for $``$. Thus, the input disturbance is essentially a channel capacity. If we write the capacity of the perfect channel as $`C_{\text{cap}}()`$, and that of the channel described by $``$ as $`C_{\text{cap}}()`$, then the input disturbance of $``$ is

$$D_\text{i}=C_{\text{cap}}()C_{\text{cap}}().$$
(30)
For classical measurements on classical systems $`D_\text{i}=0`$. For quantum measurements $`D_\text{i}0`$. To see that $`D_\text{i}`$ is non-negative one merely needs to note that the accessible information is a quantity which is maximized over all measurements. As a result, the measurement $``$ made by Eve can be included as part of Alice’s possible strategies for obtaining information in the case of the perfect channel. Thus, the case in which Eve makes her measurement is just a special case of the perfect channel in which Alice, as part of her strategy, first makes Eve’s measurement and then throws away the information before making any further measurements. Therefore, the capacity of the channel described by $``$ cannot be more than that of the perfect channel, and hence the disturbance $`D_\text{i}`$ is a non-negative quantity.

### V.2 Disturbance to the Output

The above measure of disturbance is concerned with the reduction in the ability of an observer to obtain information about an initial preparation, given that another observer has made a measurement on the system to which the first observer has no access. Now we consider the reduction in an observer’s knowledge of the final state of the system, given that a second observer has made a measurement to which the first has no access. If the initial state is $`\rho `$, then the final state of the system after a measurement $``$, from the point of view of the first observer, is

$$\rho ^{}=\underset{n}{}\mathrm{\Omega }_n\rho \mathrm{\Omega }_n^{}.$$
(31)
The reduction in the observer’s knowledge of the state of the system, $`\rho `$, caused by $``$, may be characterized by the increase in the von Neumann entropy of $`\rho ^{}`$ over $`\rho `$. That is,

$$D_\text{o}(\rho )=S[\rho ^{}]S[\rho ].$$
(32)
This quantity is zero for classical measurements, and Ando has shown that it is non-negative for all bare measurements AndoMaj .

No doubt there is more than one way to use the above measure to obtain a quantity which characterizes the measurement alone, and it may well be that different choices may be motivated by different applications. Nevertheless, one reasonable procedure is to minimize $`D_\text{o}(\rho )`$ over all initial states. That is, to define the output disturbance of a measurement as

$$D_\text{o}\underset{\rho }{inf}S\left[\underset{n}{}\mathrm{\Omega }_n\rho \mathrm{\Omega }_n^{}\right]S[\rho ].$$
(33)
This measures the least disturbance that can be achieved with the given measurement if one is free to select the initial state. Under this definition one has the desirable result that all commutative measurements have $`D_\text{o}=0`$.

## VI Information Gathering and State-Space Symmetry

### VI.1 Classical Measurements

Since classical measurements have already been introduced in Section II, we will merely pause to clarify our definitions: By a classical measurement, we will mean a measurement which can be performed on a classical system. Thus a classical measurement is not only one in which all the measurement operators commute, but also one in which is it understood that the density operator is also required to be diagonal in the same basis as these operators. We will refer to measurements in which the only restriction is that the operators commute as commutative quantum measurements. The reason for this distinction is that it is possible to enhance the properties of measurements with unitary transformations rapidP . Since such transformations require transforming the density matrix so that it is diagonal in other bases, one must make a distinction between classical measurements and commutative measurements; the latter can be enhanced in ways in which the former cannot.

For classical measurements, there is no difference between the information about the initial encoding, and that about the state which exists after the measurement, because the measurement does not interfere with the initial preparation; both $`\mathrm{\Delta }I_\text{i}(,\epsilon )`$ and $`\mathrm{\Delta }I_f(,\rho )`$ reduce to the classical mutual information, which we will write simply as $`\mathrm{\Delta }I(,\rho )`$. Thus $`K=C`$, and the measurement strength $`K_I`$ is the mutual information between the output results and the initial preparation when the encoding is the uniform ensemble over the all the available initial states.

Now, the mutual information is the average decrease in the Shannon entropy of the observer’s state of knowledge as a result of the measurement, and depends, in general upon not only the measurement but also the initial state. How exactly, does it depend on the initial state? Since the entropy of the state cannot decrease below zero, one might suggest that the information gain in the measurement decreases as the uncertainty in the observer’s initial state of knowledge decreases: the more you know the less you find out. However, from the fact that the mutual information is not always maximized when the ensemble has maximal entropy, we know that it is possible for the reverse to be true for at least some measurements and some states. So is there a sense in which a reduction in information gain with increasing knowledge is a fundamental property of measurement?

To answer this question, we consider a class of measurements which we will refer to as permutation-symmetric measurements. We define these measurements as those which are symmetric under the permutation of two classical basis states. That is, when any two states $`|i`$ and $`|j`$ are swapped, the set of measurement operators remains unchanged — the various measurement operators merely interchange among themselves. The motivation for such a definition is the observation that the information extraction capability (or accuracy, or resolution) of a measurement can, in general, vary across the state space, and it is this that causes some measurements to provide a larger average amount of information when applied to states with less that maximal entropy. The definition of permutation-symmetric measurements ensures that they have the same resolving power over all of state space. We now show that these measurements have the property which we seek. First it is helpful to introduce some notation. We will denote the vector of eigenvalues of a matrix $`A`$ by $`\lambda (A)`$. If we write $`\rho \sigma `$ then we will mean that $`\lambda (\rho )\lambda (\sigma )`$ Majnote .

Theorem: If $``$ is classical and permutation-symmetric, then for any two classical states $`\rho `$ and $`\sigma `$, $`\rho \sigma `$ implies that $`\mathrm{\Delta }I(,\rho )>\mathrm{\Delta }I(,\sigma )`$. (Note that a more concise way of saying this is that $`\mathrm{\Delta }I(,\rho )`$ is Schur-concave in $`\rho `$ MO ).

Proof: To begin we note that given a diagonal operator $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$ of dimension $`N`$, the sum of the $`N!`$ operators, $`\{\mathrm{\Omega }_m\}`$ which are the different permutations of $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$, is proportional to the identity. This means that the operators $`\{\alpha \mathrm{\Omega }_m\}`$ form a valid measurement for some $`\alpha `$. In what follows when we refer to an operator $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$ which is used to generate a permutation-symmetric measurement by taking all its permutations, we will always define $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$ so that $`\text{Tr}[E]=\text{Tr}[\mathrm{\Omega }^2]=1`$, in which case $`\alpha =1/\sqrt{(N1)!}`$. We will refer to a measurement generated by a single operator $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$ as an irreducible permutation-symmetric measurement (IPM). Clearly all permutation-symmetric measurements can be written as mixtures (in the sense of the mixing operation described in section III) of IPM’s. Now consider the mutual information for an IPM. This may be written as

$$\mathrm{\Delta }I(,\rho )=H[Q_\rho (m)]\underset{n}{}P_\rho (n)H(Q_\rho (m|n)),$$
(34)
where $`Q_\rho (m)`$ is the distribution of the measurement outcomes, $`P_\rho (n)`$ is the distribution of the initial states (being the diagonal of $`\rho `$), and $`Q_\rho (m|n)`$ is the distribution of measurement outcomes given that the initial state is $`n`$. The first thing to note is that due to the permutation symmetry, $`H(Q_\rho (m|n))`$ is the same for all $`m`$. Thus, the second term is independent of the initial state $`\rho `$, and we need merely show that

$$H[Q_\rho (n)]>H[Q_\sigma (n)]\text{when}\rho \sigma .$$
(35)
For this it is sufficient to show that $`Q_\rho Q_\sigma `$ if $`\rho \sigma `$. That is, that the operation that transforms $`\rho `$ to $`Q_\rho `$ preserves majorization. The operation that transforms $`\rho `$ to $`Q_\rho `$ may be written as

$$Q_\rho =A\rho _v,$$
(36)
where $`\rho _v`$ is the vector consisting of the diagonal of $`\rho `$, and $`A`$ is a matrix whose rows are the diagonals of the operators $`\mathrm{\Omega }_m\mathrm{\Omega }_m^{}`$. The rows of $`A`$ therefore consist of all the permutations of any given row. At this point we can invoke a theorem of Chong Chong74 ; MO , who has shown that the operation of multiplication by a matrix preserves majorization if the matrix is such that the rows form a permutation invariant set. That is, if all permutations of any row of the matrix are also rows of the matrix. We will refer to matrices of this form in what follows as Chong matrices. This proves the result for IPM’s. Since every permutation-symmetric measurement is a mixture of IPM’s, and $`\mathrm{\Delta }I`$ is linear under mixing, the result holds for all permutation-symmetric measurements. $`\mathrm{}`$

That is, once we have eliminated the state-space dependence of the resolution of measurements, a fundamental property remains. This is that, the more one knows, the less is the amount that one will learn by applying a given measurement.

As a corollary of this, we have that the classical capacity of a classical irreducible permutation-symmetric measurement is attained by the uniform distribution, and is therefore given by

$$C=\mathrm{ln}NS(E),$$
(37)
where $`S`$ is the von Neumann entropy, and $`E\mathrm{\Omega }^2`$. In addition, it is worth noting that since both classical channels and classical measurements are defined by a complete set of conditional probabilities, classical measurements and classical channels are one and the same thing. Thus, Eq.(37) also gives the capacity of irreducible permutation-symmetric classical channels. The capacity of a general permutation-symmetric measurement

$$=\underset{n=1}{\overset{N}{}}p_n𝒩_n,$$
(38)
where each of the measurements $`𝒩_n`$ is generated by the operator $`E_n`$ is thus

$$C=\mathrm{ln}N\underset{n=1}{\overset{N}{}}p_nS(E_n).$$
(39)
### VI.2 Unitarily Covariant Measurements

In the previous subsection we found a class of classical measurements for which the information provided by the measurement always increased with the initial uncertainty. In this section we turn our attention to quantum measurements. In this case, it is the Unitarily Covariant Measurements (UCM’s), to be defined below, which are the equivalent of the classical permutation-symmetric measurements, in that they are invariant under all reversible transformations of the state-space. However, in considering the information gathering properties of UCM’s we need to be a little more precise about what we mean by ‘information about the initial state’.

In the previous section we assumed that the information was always encoded in individual (or pure) states, rather than probability densities of states (or mixtures). What this assumption meant is that $`\mathrm{\Delta }I_i`$, which measures the information provided about the encoded message, also measured the information obtained about which state the system was initially in. Note that, since classical systems are always in some ‘pure’ state, it is not ambiguous to ask what state the system is in, even if the initial encoding is in mixed states. However, if the initial encoding does use mixed states, $`\mathrm{\Delta }I_i`$ no longer measures the information that the measurement provides about the what state the system is in.

When we consider obtaining a quantum equivalent of the theorem of the previous section, then we need to use the equivalent notion of information - that is, information about what pure state the system is in. Now, in quantum mechanics, in general the system does not have to be in any pure state, since an alternative exists - it could be entangled with another system. Thus, we need to be clear that the situation we are concerned with here is that in which the system is known to be in some pure state. The information we are concerned with is the information provided about what that state is, and this is what $`\mathrm{\Delta }I_i(,\epsilon )`$ measures so long as $`\epsilon `$ is an ensemble of pure states. In what follows our analysis will therefore be restricted to ensembles of pure states.

To begin, the unitarily covariant measurements Barnum ; Ucov  are defined as being those measurements which are invariant under every unitary transformation of the measurement operators; that is, when all the measurement operators are transformed by a given unitary, all the measurement operators merely transform among themselves. Thus, every UCM has a continuum of measurement operators, labeled by the unitary transforms $`U`$.

Now, we wish to show that the UCM’s are a class of quantum measurements for which the information gain about the initial pure state ensemble, $`\mathrm{\Delta }I_\text{i}(,\epsilon )`$, always increases with the initial uncertainty. Now we must ask, ‘the initial uncertainty of what?’. Since, in general, $`\mathrm{\Delta }I_\text{i}(,\epsilon )`$ is a function of the initial ensemble, one might expect that we would have to consider some uncertainty property of the ensemble, rather than the initial state, $`\rho `$. However, it turns out that this is not the case:

Theorem: The information $`\mathrm{\Delta }I_\text{i}(,\epsilon )`$, obtained about a pure-state ensemble $`\epsilon `$ by a unitarily covariant measurement $``$, depends on the ensemble only through the density matrix $`\rho =_iP(i)|\psi _i\psi _i|`$ where $`\epsilon =\{P(i),|\psi _i\}`$.

Proof: The expression for the information gain is

$`\mathrm{\Delta }I(,\epsilon )`$ $`=`$ $`H[Q_\rho (U)]`$ (40)
$``$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{m}{}}P_\rho (|\psi _m)H(Q_\rho (U||\psi _m)).`$
Since $``$ is unitarily covariant, $`H(Q_\rho (U||\psi _m))`$ is the same for all initial states $`|\psi _m`$, and therefore the second term is the same for all initial ensembles. As a result, $`\mathrm{\Delta }I(,\rho )`$ depends only on the first term, which depends only on $`\rho `$. $`\mathrm{}`$

In view of the above result, we now show that under unitarily covariant measurements Ucov , $`\mathrm{\Delta }I_\text{i}(,\rho (\epsilon ))`$ is Shur-concave in $`\rho `$.

Theorem: If $``$ is unitarily covariant, then for any two states $`\rho `$ and $`\sigma `$, $`\rho \sigma `$ implies that $`\mathrm{\Delta }I_i(,\rho (\epsilon ))>\mathrm{\Delta }I_i(,\sigma (\epsilon ^{}))`$, where $`\epsilon `$ and $`\epsilon ^{}`$ are ensembles of pure states.

Proof: First we note that given a positive operator $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$, we have

$$UEU^{}𝑑\mu (U)=\text{Tr}[E]I,$$
(41)
where $`E=\mathrm{\Omega }^2`$ and $`d\mu (U)`$ is the (unitarily covariant) Haar measure over unitary operators $`U`$ Ucov . Thus, to generate a covariant measurement from an operator $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$, we first scale $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$ so that $`\text{Tr}[E]=1`$. We will refer to a UC measurement generated from a single operator $`\mathrm{\Omega }`$ as an irreducible UC measurement. Now, Eq.(41) also tells us that for any covariant POVM, each subset of the measurement operators which is closed under unitary transformations form themselves a POVM. As a result we can restrict ourselves to measurements in which all the measurement operators are obtained from each other by a unitary transform; all other unitarily covariant measurements can be obtained from measurements of that form by mixing.

Now consider the information gain

$`\mathrm{\Delta }I(,\rho )`$ $`=`$ $`H[Q_\rho (U)]`$ (42)
$``$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{m}{}}P_\rho (|\psi _m)H(Q_\rho (U||\psi _m)).`$
Now, since the measurement is unitarily covariant, $`H(Q_\rho (U||\psi _m))`$ is independent of the state $`|\psi _m`$. As a result, the second term in the expression for $`\mathrm{\Delta }I`$ is independent of the ensemble probabilities $`P_\rho (|\psi _m)`$, and therefore of the initial state $`\rho `$. Thus we need merely consider the first term, $`H[Q_\rho (U)]`$. Now since

$`H[Q_\rho (U)]`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle f(\text{Tr}[UEU^{}\rho ])𝑑\mu (U)}`$ (43)
(where $`f(x)=x\mathrm{ln}x`$), $`H`$ is invariant under a unitary transformation of $`\rho `$, and as a result we can always choose the eigenvectors of $`\rho `$ to be the same as the eigenvectors of $`E`$. Denoting these eigenvectors by $`\{|j\}`$, and the eigenvalues of $`\rho `$ and $`E`$ as $`\{\lambda _j\}`$ and $`\{E_i\}`$, respectively, we have

$`Q_\rho (U)`$ $`=`$ $`\text{Tr}[UEU^{}({\displaystyle \underset{j}{}}\lambda _j|jj|)]`$ (44)
$`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{j}{}}\left[{\displaystyle \underset{i}{}}E_iM_{ij}(U)\right]\lambda _j,`$
where $`M_{ij}(U)|U_{ij}|^2`$ is a doubly stochastic matrix.

The quantity in the square brackets has two indices: the column index, $`j`$, is discrete and the ‘row’ index, $`U`$, is continuous. The sum over $`j`$ is a discrete-to-continuous version of matrix multiplication. This continuous nature will make the following discussion more involved than that in previous section, but the complication is primarily technical.

First we make the problem discrete by choosing a finite set of points on which to sample the continuous set of unitary transformations $`U`$. Let us denote the set of points as $`\{U_k:k=1,\mathrm{},L\}`$, and the sampled values of $`Q`$ at those points, as $`Q_\rho (U_k)`$. The set of these values is now a vector with $`L`$ elements. The discrete transformation may now be written as

$`Q_\rho (U_k)`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{j}{}}\left[{\displaystyle \underset{i}{}}E_iM_{ij}(U_k)\right]\lambda _j.`$ (45)
Now, for every sample point $`U_k`$, we have a doubly stochastic matrix, $`M_{ij}(U_k)`$. The fact that the continuum transformation includes every value of $`U`$ (that is, every unitary transformation), means that, given any sampling $`\{U_k:k=1,\mathrm{},L\}`$, we can extend this sampling to include every column permutation of every one of the matrices $`M_{ij}(U_k)`$. (By a column permutation we mean an operation in which one or more of the columns of $`M`$ are swapped.) That is, we can choose a new set, $`\{U_l:\}`$, such that it contains $`\{U_k:k=1,\mathrm{},L\}`$ as a subset, and the set $`\{M_{ij}(U_l):l=1,\mathrm{},L^{}\}`$ is such that for every element $`M`$, every column permutation is also an element. The transformation for this extended set is now majorization preserving, since

$`Q_\rho (U_l)`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{j}{}}\left[{\displaystyle \underset{i}{}}E_iM_{ij}(U_l)\right]\lambda _j`$ (46)
$`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{j}{}}\stackrel{~}{M}_{lj}\lambda _j,`$ (47)
and $`\stackrel{~}{M}_{lj}`$ is a Chong matrix. This is because the operation of summing over the index $`i`$ in the first line above simply involves summing each of the columns of each stochastic matrix $`M_{ij}`$, to create one row of the matrix $`\stackrel{~}{M}_{lj}`$. Since every column permutation of each $`M_{ij}`$ exists, the resulting matrix, $`\stackrel{~}{M}_{lj}`$, is such that every permutation of each row of $`\stackrel{~}{M}_{lj}`$ appears as another row of $`\stackrel{~}{M}_{lj}`$, which is Chong’s condition.

Our goal is naturally to take the limit as $`L`$ tends to infinity, to obtain the continuum result that we want. However, before we do so we must take into account the measure. In calculating the entropy of the density $`Q_\rho (U)`$, we integrate over the Haar measure. A discrete approximation of this integral for our vector $`Q_\rho (U_l)`$ is

$`H[Q_\rho (U_l)]={\displaystyle \underset{l=1}{\overset{L^{}}{}}}\mathrm{\Delta }(U_l)f[Q_\rho (U_l)],`$ (48)
where as before $`f(x)=x\mathrm{log}x`$, and $`\mathrm{\Delta }(U_l)`$ is the Haar volume associated with each sample point $`U_l`$. It is important for our purposes that in the above equation we associate the same Haar volume with all sample points which are obtained from each other by a permutation. (We will refer to the $`L`$ sets containing $`N!`$ points, all permutations of each other, as the $`L`$ permutation-invariant sets.) To see that this is possible, for any value of $`L`$, one first notes that the group of permutations forms a finite subgroup (containing $`N!`$ elements) of the group of all unitary transformations. As such, it can be used to divide the set of all unitaries up into $`N!`$ subsets, where each is the image of the others under the action of a permutation. Since the Haar measure is invariant under unitary transformations, each of these subsets has not only the same Haar volume, but any region defined within one has the same volume when that region is mapped to another. Because of this last property, we can do the following: To ensure that all the points within a given permutation-invariant set have the same associated Haar volume, we can (for example) chose our original $`L`$ points all to lie within one of the $`N!`$ factorial subsets, choosing the Haar volumes associated with each in whatever way we see fit. When we extend the set of points to include all permutations, the regions associated with the points in the first subset are mapped to each of the other $`N!1`$ subsets. Each of the new points thus has the same Haar volume as the original point of which it is the image, which means that all the points in a given permutation-invariant set have an associated region with the same Haar volume.

Thus, we can break the vector of points $`U_l`$ into $`L`$ subvectors, where the points in each are the points of one of the $`L`$ permutation-invariant sets, and which consequently all have the same associated Haar volume. The importance of this is that each of these subvectors is obtained from the $`\lambda _j`$’s by a Chong matrix. We can now write the above summation as,

$`H[Q_\rho (U_l)]={\displaystyle \underset{n=1}{\overset{L}{}}}\mathrm{\Delta }(U_n)\left[{\displaystyle \underset{l_n}{}}f[Q_\rho (U_{l_n})]\right],`$ (49)
which is simply a weighted sum of the entropies of each of the subvectors. Since each of the subvectors is obtained from the vector $`\lambda (\rho )`$ by a transformation of Chong form, the entropy of each is Shur-concave in $`\lambda (\rho )`$, and hence

$`H[Q_\rho (U_l)]>H[Q_\sigma (U_l)]`$ (50)
if $`\rho \sigma `$. Now, finally, we can take the limit $`L\mathrm{}`$, so that we recover the Haar integral, and $`H[Q_\rho (U_l)]H[Q_\rho (U)]`$. Since we know that Eq.(50) is true for each $`L`$ in the sequence, it is true in the limit, and we obtain our result for all ICM’s. Since all unitarily covariant measurements can be obtained ICM’s by mixing (i.e. averaging), the result follows for all unitarily covariant measurements. $`\mathrm{}`$

The following corollary is an immediate consequence:

Corollary: The classical capacity of a unitarily covariant measurement is obtained by the uniform ensemble over any basis.

In addition to the above result, we conjecture that the final information, $`\mathrm{\Delta }I_f(,\rho )`$, is also Shur-concave in $`\rho `$ for all unitarily covariant measurements.

### VI.3 Classical Capacities for Symmetric and Covariant Measurements

To obtain the classical capacity of a quantum measurement $``$ one must optimize $`\mathrm{\Delta }I_\text{i}(`$M$`,\epsilon )`$ over all initial encodings. However, it turns out the complexity of this procedure is significantly reduced for commutative measurements. This is because, as we now show, the classical capacity of a commutative quantum measurement is the same as that of the equivalent classical measurement. (A commutative and a classical measurement will be said to be equivalent when the measurement operators of the commutative measurement are, upon diagonalization, the same as those of the classical measurement.) This gives us the classical capacity of all Commutative Permutation-Symmetric (CPS) measurements in terms of the previous results for classical permutation-symmetric measurements.

Theorem: The classical capacity of a commutative measurement is the same as that of the equivalent classical measurement.

Proof: Let $``$ be a commutative measurement, and let us denote the basis in which the measurement operators of $``$ are diagonal as $`\{|i\}`$. Note that when we use the states $`\{|i\}`$ to encode information, the behavior of the commutative measurement is exactly the same as the equivalent classical measurement. Consider now the conditional probability, $`Q(j||\psi )`$, for outcome $`j`$ given that the initial state is the arbitrary state $`|\psi =_i\alpha _i|i`$. This is

$`Q(j||\psi )`$ $`=`$ $`\text{Tr}[E_j|\psi \psi |]={\displaystyle \underset{i}{}}|\alpha _i|^2Q(j||i).`$ (51)
But this is precisely the same expression we would have obtained if we had used the mixture $`\rho =_i|\alpha _i|^2|ii|`$ as the encoding state, instead of the pure state $`|\psi `$. Since the expression for the classical capacity can be written entirely in terms of the conditional probabilities $`Q(j||\psi _i)`$ (along with the probabilities $`P(i)`$), this means that encoding using any state which is not one of the eigenstates $`|i`$ renders the same information as encoding using a mixture of the eigenstates. Since using a mixture is never better than using a single state, the capacity is achieved by encoding using the eigenstates. In this case the commutative measurement reduces to the equivalent classical measurement, and their respective capacities are the same. $`\mathrm{}`$

Thus the classical capacity of CPS measurements is given by Eqs.(37) and (39).

It was shown in the previous section that an ensemble which achieves the classical capacity for all unitarily covariant measurements is the uniform distribution over any basis. Using this we calculate the resulting classical capacity for irreducible UC measurements in Appendix B, which is

$`C`$ $`=`$ $`\mathrm{ln}NQ(E){\displaystyle \underset{k=2}{\overset{N}{}}}{\displaystyle \frac{1}{k}},`$ (52)
where $`Q(E)`$ is the subentropy of the operator $`E`$, as defined by Jozsa, Robb and Wootters JRW . The capacity in nats of a general UC measurement,

$$=\underset{n=1}{\overset{N}{}}p_n𝒩_n,$$
(53)
where each of the irreducible UC measurements $`𝒩_n`$ is generated by the operator $`E_n`$, is thus

$`C`$ $`=`$ $`\mathrm{ln}N{\displaystyle \underset{n=1}{\overset{N}{}}}p_nQ(E_n){\displaystyle \underset{k=2}{\overset{N}{}}}{\displaystyle \frac{1}{k}}.`$ (54)
The capacity in nats of the complete unitarily covariant measurements (of which there is only one for each dimension $`N`$), being a special case of the above formula, is

$$C=\mathrm{ln}N\underset{k=2}{\overset{N}{}}\frac{1}{k}.$$
(55)
## Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank Gerard Jungman and Howard Barnum for helpful discussions, and Howard Wiseman for helpful comments on the manuscript. The author is also grateful both to Vlatko Vedral for hospitality during a visit to Imperial College, and Lucien Hardy for hospitality during a visit to the Perimeter Institute where part of this work was carried out.

## Appendix A Terminology

The following names are used in the body of the paper to designate various classes of measurements:

Bare: Measurements in which every measurement operator is a positive operator. Alternative terms which have been used for these kind of measurements are pure measurements DJJ , measurements without feedback FJ , and square root measurements Barnum .

Classical: Measurements which can be performed on systems which lie within the domain of classical physics. These are measurements in which the all the measurement operators are positive, mutually commuting, and also commute with the density matrix describing the state being measured.

Commutative: Measurements in which the all the measurement operators are mutually commuting.

Complete: Measurements in which all the effects are proportional to rank-1 projectors JRW . An alternative name for these measurements is maximal strength.

Finite-Strength: Measurements in which all the measurement operators are of full rank FJ .

Infinite-Strength: Measurements in which at least one of the measurement operators has at least one zero eigenvector.

Incomplete: Measurements in which at least one of the effects is higher than rank one.

Permutation-Symmetric: Measurements in which, if any two of the basis states are permuted, the measurement remains unchanged. That is, under a permutation of basis states, the measurement operators merely transform among themselves.

Unitarily Covariant: Measurements in which, if a unitary transformation is applied to the measurement operators, the measurement remains unchanged. That is, under a unitary transformation, all the measurement operators transform among themselves.

von Neumann: Measurements in which the all the measurement operators are commuting (orthogonal) rank-1 projectors.

## Appendix B Classical capacity of Unitarily Covariant Measurements

To calculate the classical capacity it is most convenient to use the form for the mutual information given in Eq.(11). For Unitarily covariant measurements the classical capacity is attained by an ensemble consisting of the uniform distribution over any basis, so we have

$`C()`$ $`=`$ $`\underset{\epsilon }{sup}\left[H[P(i)]{\displaystyle \underset{j}{}}Q(j)H[P(i|j)]\right]`$ (56)
$`=`$ $`\mathrm{ln}N{\displaystyle H[P(i|U)]𝑑\mu (U)}`$
$`=`$ $`\mathrm{ln}N{\displaystyle }H[NQ(U||i)P(i)]d\mu (U)`$
$`=`$ $`\mathrm{ln}N+N{\displaystyle }Q(U||\psi )\mathrm{ln}Q(U||\psi )d\mu (U)`$
$`=`$ $`\mathrm{ln}NNH[Q(U||\psi )],`$
where we have used the fact that $`Q(U||i)`$ is independent of $`|i`$, and it should be noted that in the second to last line, $`|\psi `$ simply represents any pure state, and $`d\mu (U)`$ is the unitarily covariant Haar measure over unitary transformations. To continue,

$`Q(U||\psi )`$ $`=`$ $`\text{Tr}[UEU^{}|\psi \psi |]=\psi |UEU^{}|\psi `$ (57)
$`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{j=1}{\overset{N}{}}}E_j|\psi |U|E_j|^2.`$
Thus the entropy of the conditional probability density is

$`H[Q(U||\psi )]`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{j=1}{\overset{N}{}}E_j|\psi |U|E_j|^2\mathrm{ln}\left(\underset{k=1}{\overset{N}{}}E_k|\psi |U|E_k|^2\right)d\mu (U)}`$ (58)
$`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{j=1}{\overset{N}{}}E_j|\psi |E_j|^2\mathrm{ln}\left(\underset{k=1}{\overset{N}{}}E_k|\psi |E_k|^2\right)d\mu (|\psi )},`$
where $`d\mu (|\psi )`$ is the unitarily covariant measure over pure states Jones . Writing $`P_i=|\psi |E_j|^2`$, this becomes an integral over the uniform measure on the probability simplex Sykora ; pool , being the volume defined by $`_iP_i1`$. That is

$`NH[Q(U||\psi )]`$ $`=`$ $`N!{\displaystyle _0^1}{\displaystyle _0^{1P_1}}\mathrm{}{\displaystyle _0^{1_{n=1}^{N2}P_n}}{\displaystyle \underset{j=1}{\overset{N}{}}}E_jP_j\mathrm{ln}\left({\displaystyle \underset{k=1}{\overset{N}{}}}E_kP_k\right)dP_{N1}\mathrm{}dP_1,`$ (59)
where $`P_N=1_{n=1}^{(N1)}P_n`$. Evaluating this integral is non-trivial, but it has been solved by Jones Jones , and two alternative methods are given by Jozsa, Robb and Wootters JRW . The solution is

$`NH[Q(U||\psi )]`$ $`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \underset{k=1}{\overset{N}{}}}\left((E_k\mathrm{ln}E_k){\displaystyle \underset{lk}{}}{\displaystyle \frac{E_k}{E_kE_l}}\right)`$ (60)
$`+\left({\displaystyle \frac{1}{2}}+{\displaystyle \frac{1}{3}}+\mathrm{}+{\displaystyle \frac{1}{N}}\right)`$
$`=`$ $`Q(E)+{\displaystyle \underset{k=2}{\overset{N}{}}}{\displaystyle \frac{1}{k}},`$
where $`Q(E)`$ is the subentropy of the operator $`E`$, as defined by Jozsa, Robb and Wootters. It might appear that this blows up when any of the eigenvalues of $`E`$ are equal — however this is not the case; the value of $`H[Q(U||\psi )]`$ in the limit as $`E_nE_m`$, for any $`n`$ and $`m`$, remains finite JRW . In fact, $`Q(E)S(E),E`$. Combining Eq.(60) with Eq.(56), gives the capacity (in nats) of all covariant measurements generated from a single operator $`\mathrm{\Omega }=\sqrt{E}`$. It is shown in Ref. JRW  that the maximum value of the right hand side of Eq.(60) is $`\mathrm{ln}N`$, which is obtained when $`E=I/N`$. Thus the capacity of the covariant measurement generated by $`\mathrm{\Omega }=I/\sqrt{N}`$ is zero as required.

For complete measurements, $`E_1=1`$ and $`E_j=0`$ for $`j>1`$, and the integral in Eq.(59) reduces to

$`H[Q(U||\psi )]`$ $`=`$ $`(N1){\displaystyle _0^1}(1P)^{N2}P\mathrm{ln}\left(P\right)𝑑P`$ (61)
$`=`$ $`{\displaystyle \frac{1}{N}}\left({\displaystyle \frac{1}{2}}+{\displaystyle \frac{1}{3}}+\mathrm{}+{\displaystyle \frac{1}{N}}\right).`$
Combining this with Eq.(56) gives the classical capacity (in nats) for the complete unitarily covariant measurements.