Smooth Entropy Bounds on One-Shot Quantum State Redistribution

In quantum state redistribution as introduced by Luo and Devetak and Devetak and Yard, there are four systems of interest: the A system held by Alice; the B system held by Bob; the C system that is to be transmitted from Alice to Bob; and the R system that holds a purification of the state in the ABC registers. We give upper and lower bounds on the amount of quantum communication and entanglement required to perform the task of quantum state redistribution in a one-shot setting. Our bounds are in terms of the smooth conditional minand max-entropy, and the smooth max-information. The protocol for the upper bound has a clear structure, building on the work of Oppenheim: it decomposes the quantum state redistribution task into two simpler coherent state merging tasks by introducing a coherent relay. In the independent and identical (i.i.d.) asymptotic limit our bounds for the quantum communication cost converge to the quantum conditional mutual information I(C; R|B), and our bounds for the total cost converge to the conditional entropy H(C|B). This yields an alternative proof of optimality of these rates for quantum state redistribution in the i.i.d. asymptotic limit. In particular, we obtain a strong converse for quantum state redistribution, which even holds when allowing for feedback.