Nonadditive generalization of the quantum Kullback-Leibler divergence for measuring the degree of purification

The Kullback-Leibler divergence offers an information-theoretic basis for measuring the difference between two given distributions. Its quantum analog, however, fails to play a corresponding role for comparing two density matrices, if the reference states are pure states. Here it is shown that nonadditive quantum information theory inspired by nonextensive statistical mechanics is free from such a difficulty and the associated quantity, termed the quantum q-divergence, can in fact be a good information-theoretic measure of the degree of state purification. The correspondence relation between the ordinary divergence and the q-divergence is violated for the pure reference states, in general.