Tighter generalized entropic uncertainty relations in multipartite systems

Abstract

The uncertainty principle, which demonstrates the intrinsic uncertainty of nature from an information-theory perspective, is at the heart of quantum information theory. In the realm of quantum information theory, Shannon entropy is used to depict the uncertainty relation in general. A tighter lower bound for uncertainty relations facilitates more accurate predictions of measurement outcomes and more robust quantum information processing. Interestingly, the tripartite entropic uncertainty relation (EUR) can be further optimized. Renes et al. proposed a tripartite EUR [J. M. Renes and J.-C. Boileau, Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 020402 (2009)], and subsequently, Ming et al. strengthened its lower bound in [F. Ming, D. Wang, X.-G. Fan, W.-N. Shi, L. Ye, and J.-L. Chen, Phys. Rev. A 102, 012206 (2020)]. Specifically, we derive a tighter lower bound of the tripartite EUR using the Holevo quantity. Furthermore, we generalize the tripartite EUR, that is, the generalized entropic uncertainty relation for multiple measurements in multipartite systems. As illustrations, we provide several typical examples to show that our bound is tight and outperforms the previous bound. Furthermore, our findings pave the way for using the tighter bound for the quantum secret key rate in quantum key distribution protocols and are essential for quantum precision measurements in the framework of genuine multipartite systems. By providing a close peek at the nature of uncertainty, our results may find broad applications in the security analysis of quantum cryptography.