Entropies in general probabilistic theories and their application to the Holevo bound

Abstract

General probabilistic theories are designed to provide operationally the most general probabilistic models including both classical and quantum theories. In this letter, we introduce a systematic method to construct a series of entropies, all of which generalize Shannon entropy in classical system and von Neumann entropy in quantum system. Using these entropies, the Holevo bound, an upper bound of the accessible information from a quantum system, is generalized to hold in any general probabilistic theory.