Tight bounds on accessible information and informational power

Abstract

The accessible information quantifies the amount of classical information that can be extracted from an ensemble of quantum states. Analogously, the informational power quantifies the amount of classical information that can be extracted by a quantum measurement. For both quantities, we provide upper and lower bounds that depend only on the dimension of the system, and we prove their tightness. In the case of symmetric informationally complete (SIC) ensembles and measurements, stronger bounds are provided and their tightness proved for qubits and qutrits. From our upper bounds, we notice, perhaps surprisingly, that the statistics generated by SIC ensembles or measurements in arbitrary dimension, though optimal for tomographic purposes, in fact never contain more than just one bit of information, the rest being constituted by completely random bits. On the other hand, from our lower bounds, we obtain an explicit strategy beating the so-called pretty-good one for the extraction of mutual information in the case of SIC ensembles and measurements.