Using the framework of decoherent histories, we study which past events leave detectable records in isolated quantum systems under the realistic assumption that decoherence is approximate and not perfect. In the first part we establish – asymptotically for a large class of (pseudo-)random histories – that the number of reliable records can be much smaller than the number of possible events, depending on the degree of decoherence. In the second part we reveal a clear decoherence structure for long histories based on a numerically exact solution of a random matrix model that, as we argue, captures generic aspects of decoherence. We observe recoherence between histories with a small Hamming distance, for localized histories admitting a high purity Petz recovery state, and for maverick histories that are statistical outliers with respect to Born's rule. From the perspective of the Many Worlds Interpretation, the first part – which views the self-location problem as a coherent version of quantum state discrimination – reveals a "branch selection problem", and the second part sheds light on the emergence of Born's rule and the theory confirmation problem.

For memoryless channels with continuous input alphabets, deterministic identification (DI) typically exhibits a linearithmic (nlog n) message growth. However, the exact DI capacity has long remained open due to a persistent gap between the best known achievability and converse bounds. This gap was recently closed for AWGN channels via a novel code construction optimising the "galaxy" codes. Here, we extend this approach to the Bernoulli channel and subsequently to any channel W whose image contains a continuous curve of output probability distributions, and hence admits a reduction to the Bernoulli channel restricted to a subinterval of inputs. As a consequence, we prove that the converse bound is tight and establish Ċ_DI(W) = 1/2 for this broad class of channels, thereby closing the long-standing capacity gap. A similar gap was also observed for the DI rate-reliability tradeoff. We analyse the tradeoff between rate and error of the proposed code and derive improved lower bounds on the reliability function, approaching the converse at leading order in the regime of small error exponents.

We extend the recent analysis of the rate-reliability tradeoff in deterministic identification (DI) to general linear Gaussian channels, marking the first such analysis for channels with continuous output. Because DI provides a framework that can substantially enhance communication efficiency, and since the linear Gaussian model underlies a broad range of physical communication systems, our results offer both theoretical insights and practical relevance for the performance evaluation of DI in future networks. Moreover, the structural parallels observed between the Gaussian and discrete-output cases suggest that similar rate-reliability behaviour may extend to wider classes of continuous channels.

In the context of p-adic quantum mechanics, we investigate composite systems of p-adic qubits and p-adically controlled quantum logic gates. We build on the notion of a single p-adic qubit as a two-dimensional irreducible representation of the compact p-adic special orthogonal group SO(3)_p. We show that the classification of these representations reduces to the finite case, as they all factorise through some finite quotient SO(3)_p mod p^k. Then, we tackle the problem of p-adic qubit composition and entanglement, fundamental for a p-adic formulation of quantum information processing. We classify the representations of SO(3)_p mod p, and analyse tensor products of two p-adic qubit representations lifted from SO(3)_p mod p. We solve the Clebsch-Gordan problem for such systems, revealing that the coupled bases decompose into singlet and doublet states. We further study entanglement arising from those stable subsystems. For p=3, we construct a set of gates from 4-dimensional irreducible representations of SO(3)_p mod p that we prove to be universal for quantum computation.

The use of coarse graining to connect physical and information theoretic entropies has recently been given a precise formulation in terms of “observational entropy”, describing entropy for observers with respect to a measurement. Here we consider observers with various locality restrictions, including local measurements (LO), measurements based on local operations with classical communication (LOCC), and separable measurements (SEP), with the idea that the “entropy gap” between the minimum locally measured observational entropy and the von Neumann entropy quantifies quantum correlations in a given state. After introducing entropy gaps for general classes of measurements and deriving their general properties, we specialize to LO, LOCC, SEP and other measurement classes related to the locality of subsystems. For those, we show that the entropy gap can be related to well-known measures of entanglement or non-classicality of the state (even though we point out that they are not entanglement monotones themselves). In particular, for bipartite pure states, all of the “local” entropy gaps reproduce the entanglement entropy, and for general multipartite states they are lower-bounded by the relative entropy of entanglement. The entropy gaps of the different measurement classes are ordered, and we show that in general (mixed and multipartite states) they are all different.

We study thermodynamic state transformations in the resource theory of work and heat when the initial quantum state is unknown. Moving beyond state-dependent protocols, we develop a universal framework in which a single transformation applies to all admissible input states. For mutually commuting conserved charges, we construct charge-conserving protocols whose transformation error, quantified by trace distance, decays super-polynomially with the number of system copies. As an application, we demonstrate universal work extraction: asymptotically optimal work can be extracted without microscopic knowledge of the initial state, with a super-polynomially small error. Our results show that thermodynamic state transformations remain achievable under limited prior information and establish a universal framework for resource-theoretic thermodynamics beyond the state-aware setting.

Bayesian games, also known as games of incomplete information, are a fruitful arena for exploring the impact of correlations on a set of independent agents (players) via the game equilibria to which they give rise. It was realised some time ago that quantum states shared between the players can lead to new and beneficial equilibria, compared to classical correlation. While until now examples of this effect required an entangled state, here we show that even separable states can create new, genuinely quantum equilibria in games, that are advantageous with respect to all classically correlated equilibria. This shows that non-classical correlations beyond entanglement are indeed a resource, even in otherwise entirely classical situations. Our result brings quantum advantage in games significantly closer to possible realisation.

We investigate the geometric structure of the set of spectra of bipartite absolute separable states (ASEP_m,n) and absolute positive partial transpose states (APPT_m,n), i.e., bipartite quantum states that remain separable or PPT respectively, under all global unitary transformations. First, we establish general geometric properties of absolute convex sets of matrices, their spectra and extreme points. Regarding absolute separability, we present a permutation-symmetric reformulation of the absolute PPT criterion and use it to demonstrate that APPT_m,n is a spectrahedron for all m≤ n: in particular, all its faces are exposed. In contrast, while ASEP_2,n is also a spectrahedron, we prove that in general ASEP_m,n is a semialgebraic set for all m≤ n. Furthermore, we provide a complete characterization of the faces and extreme points of APPT_m,n and demonstrate that the dimension of a face is determined by the rank of a certain matrix, with maximal proper faces having dimension (mn-m-1). In the quantitative setting, we provide a rigorous lower bound on the maximal attainable purity of APPT_m,n via an inscribed polytope 𝒫_m,n and conjecture that the maximal purity of APPT_m,n (along with its spectra) coincides with the polytope for arbitrary dimensions except when m=n=2. Additionally, we also provide a rigorous upper bound on the minimal von Neumann entropy of APPT_m,n and demonstrate numerically that the minimum entropy eventually coincides with the polytope 𝒫_m,n as the local system dimension n increases. Finally, we show that the relative spectral volume of APPT_m,n decays exponentially in n by a constant multiplicative factor of the relative volume of the inscribed polytope 𝒫_m,n.

We show a simple and systematic way to certify any given bipartite state as the unique joint 1-eigenstate of two separable projectors, each of which can be measured with simple local observables. This is practically useful, as the detection probabilities of the two stabilizer projectors relate directly to the fidelity of certification. The same result gives a simple and effective lower bound on the entanglement fidelity of a quantum channel in terms of two ensemble fidelities. We then generalize the bipartite result recursively to multipartite systems, showing that every n-party pure state is the unique joint 1-eigenstate of 2n-1 separable projectors, and an upper bound of the infidelity of the state in terms of the infidelities of the separable stabilizer projectors.

The Holevo barycenter of a quantum channel is the unique output state obtained as the average output of any ensemble achieving the Holevo capacity. Given two quantum channels, the multiplicativity problem asks whether this barycenter tensorizes under parallel composition, namely whether the barycenter of the product channel coincides with the tensor product of the individual barycenters. This question is closely related to the additivity problem for the Holevo capacity: additivity implies tensorization of the Holevo barycenter, while tensorization alone is not sufficient for additivity. Although a construction is known that demonstrates the existence of channels with non-additive Holevo capacity, their corresponding Holevo barycenters still tensorize, leaving open whether multiplicativity might ultimately hold universally. Here, we answer this question in the negative by exhibiting channels for which the Holevo barycenter is not multiplicative under the tensor product of the channel with itself. Moreover, we show that the entropy of the Holevo barycenter is neither universally subadditive nor universally superadditive under tensor product.

Deterministic identification (DI) has emerged as a promising paradigm for large-scale and goal-oriented communication systems. Despite significant progress, a fundamental open problem has remained unresolved: a persistent gap between the best known lower and upper bounds on the DI capacity, as well as on the corresponding rate-reliability tradeoff bounds. In this paper, we finally close this gap for Gaussian channels 𝒢 by constructing an optimised code that achieves the known upper bound. This allows us to establish that the linearithmic capacity for deterministic identification is Ċ_DI(𝒢)=1/2. Furthermore, we analyse the rate-reliability tradeoff and show that the proposed scheme matches the known upper bounds to first order, thereby closing the existing gap in reliability performance for all admissible error decay regimes. Finally, we demonstrate the existence of an optimum universal code, which does not require knowledge of the channel parameters and yet achieves capacity.

Shadow tomography addresses the task of efficiently predicting many expectation values of an unknown quantum state from randomized measurements on comparatively few copies. Existing analyses promise large scaling advantages, but the optimal strategies realizing these guarantees are not always known, and the required measurements are potentially challenging to implement on current hardware. We address this gap for Pauli observables by computing optimal sample-complexity parameters and constructing optimal measurement strategies under realistic resource constraints. We focus on memoryless protocols, where each copy is measured only once, and on measurements with bounded interaction range. Our approach reduces the problem to the analysis of graph parameters of the frustration graph encoding the Pauli anticommutation relations. We provide efficient numerical methods for the general case and analytically prove that Clifford measurements are optimal in many situations. This includes all perfect graphs, all single-qubit, all two-qubit measurement scenarios, and more. Applied to Hamiltonian energy estimation, our framework yields constructive strategies and improved variance bounds for molecular benchmarks.

We consider a rate-distortion version of the quantum state redistribution task, where the error of the decoded state is judged via an additive distortion measure; it thus constitutes a quantum generalisation of the classical Wyner-Ziv problem. The quantum source is described by a tripartite pure state shared between Alice ($A$, encoder), Bob ($B$, decoder) and a reference ($R$). Both Alice and Bob are required to output a system ($\widetilde{A}$ and $\widetilde{B}$, respectively), and the distortion measure is encoded in an observable on $\widetilde{A}\widetilde{B}R$. It includes as special cases most quantum rate-distortion problems considered in the past, and in particular quantum data compression with the fidelity measured per copy; furthermore, it generalises the well-known state merging and quantum state redistribution tasks for a pure state source, with per-copy fidelity, and a variant recently considered by us, where the source is an ensemble of pure states [1], [2]. We derive a single-letter formula for the rate-distortion function of compression schemes assisted by free entanglement. A peculiarity of the formula is that in general it requires optimisation over an unbounded auxiliary register, so the rate-distortion function is not readily computable from our result, and there is a continuity issue at zero distortion. However, we show how to overcome these difficulties in certain situations.

Recently, Wooltorton et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 132, 210802 (2024)] and Farkas [Phys. Rev. Lett. 132, 210803 (2024)] have exhibited the mismatch between Bell inequality violations and their cryptographic application in device-independent quantum key distribution, by showing that arbitrarily close to the set of local behaviours there exist quantum correlations guaranteeing a constant rate of secret key. While these results require correlations attaining the maximum quantum value of a suitable Bell observable (aka the Tsirelson bound) and rely on a kind of ideal self-testing of a maximally entangled state and associated Bell measurement, here we show that the effect is robust: for every one of the Bell inequalities considered by Wooltorton et al., a constant rate of secret key ensues if the observed Bell violation is sufficiently close to the respective Tsirelson bound. For these and also the Bell inequalities of Farkas, we furthermore present numerical results based on semidefinite relaxations of the minimum min-entropy consistent with a certain Bell violation, which demonstrate that small but nonzero key rates can be guaranteed (in principle) by practical and efficient means.

This paper establishes the exact strong converse exponent of the soft covering problem in the classical setting. This exponent characterizes the slowest achievable convergence speed of the total variation to one when a code of rate below mutual information is applied to a discrete memoryless channel for synthesizing a product output distribution. The proposed exponent is expressed through a new two-parameter information quantity, differing from the more commonly studied Renyi divergence or Renyi mutual information. In addition, we demonstrate the non-tightness of random coding for rates both below and above mutual information. Discussions on the latter start with noiseless channels, where we develop a deterministic code construction that outperforms random codes in error exponents. We further observe that the conventional formulation, which assumes a uniform distribution over messages, inherently introduces a discrepancy in error exponents depending on whether the components of the target distribution are rational or irrational numbers. To eliminate this discrepancy, we propose a new formulation in which messages are allowed to be distributed non-uniformly, and the rate is given by the logarithm of the smallest nonzero message probability (corresponding to Renyi entropy H-infinity of order infinity). The exact error exponent is characterized in this formulation for noiseless channels. Furthermore, for noisy channels, we provide a high-rate improvement in achievability and derive a converse bound on the error exponent.

Following initial work by JaJa, Ahlswede and Cai, and inspired by a recent renewed surge in interest in deterministic identification (DI) via noisy channels, we consider the problem in its generality for memoryless channels with finite output, but arbitrary input alphabets. Such a channel is essentially given by its output distributions as a subset in the probability simplex. Our main findings are that the maximum length of messages thus identifiable scales superlinearly as $R\,n\log n$ with the block length n, and that the optimal rate R is bounded in terms of the covering (aka Minkowski, or Kolmogorov, or entropy) dimension d of a certain algebraic transformation of the output set: $\frac {1}{4} d \leq R \leq \frac {1}{2} d$ . Remarkably, both the lower and upper Minkowski dimensions play a role in this result. Along the way, we present a Hypothesis Testing Lemma showing that it is sufficient to ensure pairwise reliable distinguishability of the output distributions to construct a DI code. Although we do not know the exact capacity formula, we can conclude that the DI capacity exhibits superactivation: there exist channels whose capacities individually are zero, but whose product has positive capacity. We also generalise these results to classical-quantum channels with finite-dimensional output quantum system, in particular to quantum channels on finite-dimensional quantum systems under the constraint that the identification code can only use tensor product inputs.

We approach two interconnected problems of quantum information processing in networks: Conference key agreement and entanglement distillation, both in the so-called source model where the given resource is a multipartite quantum state and the players interact over public classical channels to generate the desired correlation. The first problem is the distillation of a conference key when the source state is shared between a number of legal players and an eavesdropper; the eavesdropper, apart from starting off with this quantum side information, also observes the public communication between the players. The second is the distillation of Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) states by means of local operations and classical communication (LOCC) from the given mixed state. These problem settings extend our previous paper [IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory 68(2):976-988, 2022], and we generalise its results: using a quantum version of the task of communication for omniscience, we derive novel lower bounds on the distillable conference key from any multipartite quantum state by means of non-interacting communication protocols. Secondly, we establish novel lower bounds on the yield of GHZ states from multipartite mixed states. Namely, we present two methods to produce bipartite entanglement between sufficiently many nodes so as to produce GHZ states. Next, we show that the conference key agreement protocol can be made coherent under certain conditions, enabling the direct generation of multipartite GHZ states.

We introduce a definition of coarse-grained entropy that unifies measurement-based (observational entropy) and max-entropy-based (Jaynes) approaches to coarse-graining, by identifying physical constraints with information theoretic priors. The definition is shown to include as special cases most other entropies of interest in physics. We then consider second laws, showing that the definition admits new entropy increase theorems and connections to thermodynamics. We survey mathematical properties of the definition, and show it resolves some pathologies of the traditional observational entropy in infinite dimensions. Finally, we study the dynamics of this entropy in a quantum random matrix model and a classical hard sphere gas. Together the results suggest that this generalized observational entropy can form the basis of a highly general approach to statistical mechanics.

In our previous work, we presented the Hypothesis Testing Lemma, a key tool that establishes sufficient conditions for the existence of good deterministic identification (DI) codes for memoryless channels with finite output, but arbitrary input alphabets. In this work, we provide a full quantum analogue of this lemma, which shows that the existence of a DI code in the quantum setting follows from a suitable packing in a modified space of output quantum states. Specifically, we demonstrate that such a code can be constructed using product states derived from this packing. This result enables us to tighten the capacity lower bound for DI over quantum channels beyond the simultaneous decoding approach. In particular, we can now express these bounds solely in terms of the Minkowski dimension of a certain state space, giving us new insights to better understand the nature of the protocol, and the separation between simultaneous and non-simultaneous codes. We extend the discussion with a particular channel example for which we can construct an optimum code.

We correct an error in the proof of Theorem 11 in our paper “Approximate Degradable Quantum Channels”, IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 63, no. 12, pp. 7832-7844, 2017, concerning an upper bound on the private capacity of an approximate anti-degradable channel. Furthermore, we show how to obtain a tighter bound for the quantum capacity.