Entanglement of Formation and Conditional Information Transmission

Abstract

We show that the separability of states in quantum mechanics has a close counterpart in classical physics, and that conditional mutual information (a.k.a. conditional information transmission) is a very useful quantity in the study of both quantum and classical separabilities. We also show how to define entanglement of formation in terms of conditional mutual information. This paper lays the theoretical foundations for a sequel paper which will present a computer program that can calculate a decomposition of any separable quantum or classical state.