Residual and Destroyed Accessible Information after Measurements

Abstract

When quantum states are used to send classical information, the receiver performs a measurement on the signal states. The amount of information extracted is often not optimal due to the receiver's measurement scheme and experimental apparatus. For quantum non-demolition measurements, there is potentially some residual information in the post-measurement state, while part of the information has been extracted and the rest is destroyed. Here, we propose a framework to characterize a quantum measurement by how much information it extracts and destroys, and how much information it leaves in the residual post-measurement state. The concept is illustrated for several receivers discriminating coherent states.