From Classical to Quantum: Uniform Continuity Bounds on Entropies in Infinite Dimensions

Abstract

We prove a variety of improved uniform continuity bounds for entropies of both classical random variables on an infinite state space and of quantum states of infinite-dimensional systems. We obtain the first tight continuity estimate on the Shannon entropy of random variables with a countably infinite alphabet. The proof relies on a new mean-constrained Fano-type inequality. We then employ this classical result to derive a tight energy-constrained continuity bound for the von Neumann entropy. To deal with more general entropies in infinite dimensions, <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">e.g</i> . α-Rényi and α-Tsallis entropies, we develop a novel approximation scheme based on operator Hölder continuity estimates. Finally, we settle an open problem raised by Shirokov [1], [2] regarding the characterisation of states with finite entropy.