General Mixed State Quantum Data Compression with and without Entanglement Assistance

We consider the most general (finite-dimensional) quantum mechanical information source, which is given by a quantum system A that is correlated with a reference system R. The task is to compress A in such a way as to reproduce the joint source state ρ
^AR
at the decoder with asymptotically high fidelity. This includes Schumacher's original quantum source coding problem of a pure state ensemble and that of a single pure entangled state, as well as general mixed state ensembles. Here, we determine the optimal compression rate (in qubits per source system) in terms of the Koashi-Imoto decomposition of the source into a classical, a quantum, and a redundant part. The same decomposition yields the optimal rate in the presence of unlimited entanglement between compressor and decoder, and indeed the full region of feasible qubitebit rate pairs. Full version at arXiv:1912.08506 [1].