Communication, correlation and complementarity

In quantum communication, a sender prepares a quantum system in a state corresponding to his message and conveys it to a receiver, who performs a measurement on it. The receiver acquires information about the message based on the outcome of his measurement. Since the state of a single quantum system is not always completely determinable from measurement, quantum mechanics limits the information capacity of such channels. According to a theorem of Kholevo, the amount of information conveyed by the channel can be no greater than the entropy of the ensemble of possible physical signals. The connection between information and entropy allows general theorems to be proved regarding the energy requirements of communication. For example, it can be shown that one particular quantum coding scheme, called thermal coding, uses energy with maximum efficiency.; A close analogy between communication and quantum correlation can be made using Everett's notion of relative states. Kholevo's theorem can be used to prove that the mutual information of a pair of observables on different systems is bounded by the entropy of the state of each system. This confirms and extends an old conjecture of Everett.; The complementarity of quantum observables can be described by information-theoretic uncertainty relations, several of which have been previously derived. These relations imply limits on the degree to which different messages can be coded in complementary observables of a single channel. Complementarity also restricts the amount of information that can be recovered from a given channel using a given decoding observable.; Information inequalities can be derived which are analogous to the well-known Bell inequalities for correlated quantum systems. These inequalities are satisfied for local hidden variable theories but are violated by quantum systems, even where the correlation is weak. These information inequalities are metric inequalities for an "information distance", and their structure can be made exactly analogous to that of the familiar covariance Bell inequalities by introducing a "covariance distance". Similar inequalities derived for successive measurements on a single system are also violated in quantum mechanics.