Local additivity revisited

Abstract

We make a number of simplifications in Gour and Friedland’s proof of local additivity of the minimum output entropy of a quantum channel. We follow them in reframing the question as one about the entanglement entropy of bipartite states associated with a dB × dE matrix. We use a different approach to reduce the general case to that of a square positive definite matrix. We use the integral representation of the log to obtain expressions for the first and second derivatives of the entropy, and then exploit the modular operator and functional calculus to streamline the proof following their underlying strategy. We also extend this result to the maximum relative entropy with respect to a fixed reference state, which has important implications for studying the superadditivity of the capacity of a quantum channel to transmit classical information.