Language：English   Publisher：Reports on Progress in Physics  

To understand the emergence of macroscopic irreversibility from microscopic reversible dynamics, the idea of coarse-graining plays a fundamental role. In this work, we develop a unified inferential framework for macroscopic states, that is, coarse descriptions of microscopic quantum systems that can be inferred from macroscopic measurements. Building on quantum statistical sufficiency and Bayesian retrodiction, we characterize macroscopic states through equivalent abstract (algebraic) and explicit (constructive) formulations. Central to our approach is the notion of observational deficit, which quantifies the degree of irretrodictability of a state relative to a prior and a measurement. This leads to a general definition of macroscopic entropy as an inferentially grounded measure of asymmetry under Bayesian inversion. We formalize this structure in terms of inferential reference frames, defined by the pair consisting of a prior and a measurement, which encapsulate the observer’s informational perspective. We then formulate a resource theory of microscopicity, treating macroscopic states as free states and introducing a hierarchy of microscopicity-non-generating operations. This theory unifies and extends existing resource theories of coherence, athermality, and asymmetry. Finally, we apply the framework to study quantum correlations under observational constraints, introducing the notion of observational discord and deriving necessary and sufficient conditions for their vanishing in terms of information recoverability. This work is dedicated to Professor Ryszard Horodecki on the occasion of his 80th birthday, in deep admiration and gratitude for his pioneering contributions to quantum information theory.

DOI： 10.1088/1361-6633/ae140e

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PubMed

Publisher：Physical Review Research  

Observational entropy - a quantity that unifies Boltzmann's entropy, Gibbs' entropy, von Neumann's macroscopic entropy, and the diagonal entropy - was recently argued to play a key role in a modern formulation of statistical mechanics. Here, relying on algebraic techniques taken from Petz's theory of statistical sufficiency and on a Lévy-type concentration bound, we prove rigorous theorems showing how the observational entropy of a system undergoing a unitary evolution chosen at random tends to increase with overwhelming probability and to reach its maximum very quickly. More precisely, we show that for any observation that is sufficiently coarse with respect to the size of the system, regardless of the initial state of the system (be it pure or mixed), random evolution renders its state practically indistinguishable from the uniform (i.e., maximally mixed) distribution with a probability approaching 1 as the size of the system grows. The same conclusion holds not only for random evolutions sampled according to the unitarily invariant Haar distribution but also for approximate 2-designs, which are thought to provide a more physically and computationally reasonable model of random evolutions.

DOI： 10.1103/PhysRevResearch.6.043327

Open Access

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Publisher：Journal of Physics A Mathematical and Theoretical  

We study the properties of the random quantum states induced from the uniformly random pure states on a bipartite quantum system by taking the partial trace over the larger subsystem. Most of the previous studies have adopted a viewpoint of ‘concentration of measure’ and have focused on the behavior of the states close to the average. In contrast, we investigate the large deviation regime, where the states may be far from the average. We prove the following results: first, the probability that the induced random state is within a given set decreases no slower or faster than exponential in the dimension of the subsystem traced out. Second, the exponent is equal to the quantum relative entropy of the maximally mixed state and the given set, multiplied by the dimension of the remaining subsystem. Third, the total probability of a given set strongly concentrates around the element closest to the maximally mixed state, a property that we call conditional concentration. Along the same line, we also investigate an asymptotic behavior of coherence of random pure states in a single system with large dimensions.

DOI： 10.1088/1751-8121/ad36fd

Open Access

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Publisher：IEEE Transactions on Information Theory  

— We introduce and analyze an information theoretical task that we call the quantum multiple-access one-time pad. Here, a number of senders initially share a correlated quantum state with a receiver and an eavesdropper. Each sender performs a local operation to encode a classical message and sends their system to the receiver, who subsequently performs a measurement to decode the messages. The receiver will be able to decode the messages almost perfectly, while the eavesdropper must not be able to extract information about the messages even if they have access to the quantum systems transmitted. We consider a “conditional” scenario in which a portion of the receiver’s side information is also accessible to the eavesdropper. We investigate the maximum amount of classical information that can be encoded by each of the senders. We derive a single-letter characterization for the achievable rate region in an asymptotic limit of infinitely many copies and vanishingly small error.

DOI： 10.1109/TIT.2023.3320678

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