The Operational Meaning of Min- and Max-Entropy

In this paper, we show that the conditional min-entropy H min ( A | B ) of a bipartite state rhoAB is directly related to the maximum achievable overlap with a maximally entangled state if only local actions on the B -part of rhoAB are allowed. In the special case where A is classical, this overlap corresponds to the probability of guessing A given B . In a similar vein, we connect the conditional max-entropy H max ( A | B ) to the maximum fidelity of rhoAB with a product state that is completely mixed on A . In the case where A is classical, this corresponds to the security of A when used as a secret key in the presence of an adversary holding B . Because min- and max-entropies are known to characterize information-processing tasks such as randomness extraction and state merging, our results establish a direct connection between these tasks and basic operational problems. For example, they imply that the (logarithm of the) probability of guessing A given B is a lower bound on the number of uniform secret bits that can be extracted from A relative to an adversary holding B .