Randomness cost of masking quantum information and the information conservation law

Abstract

Masking quantum information, which is impossible without randomness as a resource, is a task that encodes quantum information into bipartite quantum state while forbidding local parties from accessing to that information. In this work, we disprove the geometric conjecture about unitarily maskable states [K. Modi et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 230501 (2018)], and make an algebraic analysis of quantum masking. First, we show a general result on quantum channel mixing that a subchannel's mixing probability should be suppressed if its classical capacity is larger than the mixed channel's capacity. This constraint combined with the well-known information conservation law, a law that does not exist in classical information theory, gives a lower bound of randomness cost of masking quantum information as a monotone decreasing function of evenness of information distribution. This result provides a consistency test for various scenarios of fast scrambling conjecture on the black hole evaporation process. The results given here are robust to incompleteness of quantum masking.