Cone-restricted information theory

Abstract The max-relative entropy and the conditional min-entropy of a quantum state plays a central role in one-shot and zero-error quantum information theory. One attractive feature of this quantity is that it can be expressed as an optimization over the cone of positive semidefinite operators. Recently, it was shown that when replacing this cone with the cone of separable operators, a new type of conditional min-entropy emerges that admits an operational interpretation in terms of communicating classical information over a quantum channel. In this work, we explore more deeply the idea of building information-theoretic quantities from different base cones and determine which results in quantum information theory rely upon the positive semidefinite cone and which can be generalized. In terms of asymptotic information processing, we find that the standard equipartition properties break down if a given cone fails to approximate the positive semidefinite cone sufficiently well. We also show that the near-equivalence of the smooth max and Hartley entropies breaks down in this setting. We present parallel results for the extended conditional min-entropy, which requires extending the notion of k-superpositive channels to superchannels. On the other hand, we show that for classical-quantum states the separable cone is sufficient to re-cover the asymptotic theory, thereby drawing a strong distinction between the fully and partial quantum settings. We also present operational uses of this framework. We show that the cone restricted min-entropy of a Choi operator captures a measure of entanglement-assisted noiseless classical communication using restricted measurements. We also introduce a novel min-entropy-like quantity that captures the conditions for when one quantum channel can be transformed into another using bistochastic pre-processing. Lastly, we relate this framework to general conic norms and their non-additivity. Throughout this work, we concretely study generalized entropies in resource theories that capture locality and resource theories of coherence/Abelian symmetries.