A pedagogical note on the computation of relative entropy of two $n$-mode gaussian states

Abstract

We present a formula for the relative entropy S(rho||sigma) of two n mode gaussian states rho, sigma in the boson Fock space. It is shown that the relative entropy has a classical and a quantum part: The classical part consists of a weighted linear combination of relative Shannon entropies of n pairs of Bernouli trials arising from the thermal state composition of the gaussian states rho and sigma. The quantum part has a sum of n terms, that are functions of the annihilation means and the covariance matrices of 1-mode marginals of the gaussian state $\rho'$, which is equivalent to \rho under a disentangling unitary gaussian symmetry operation of the state $\sigma$. A generalized formula for the Petz-Renyi relative entropy S_alpha(rho||sigma) for gaussian states \rho, \sigma is also presented. Furthermore it is shown that the Petz-Renyi relative entropy converges to the limit S(rho||sigma) as alpha increases to 1.