On Strong Superadditivity of the Entanglement of Formation

Abstract

We employ a basic formalism from convex analysis to show a simple relation between the entanglement of formation $E_F$ and the conjugate function $E^*$ of the entanglement function $E(\rho)=S(\trace_A\rho)$. We then consider the conjectured strong superadditivity of the entanglement of formation $E_F(\rho) \ge E_F(\rho_I)+E_F(\rho_{II})$, where $\rho_I$ and $\rho_{II}$ are the reductions of $\rho$ to the different Hilbert space copies, and prove that it is equivalent with subadditivity of $E^*$. As an application, we show that strong superadditivity would follow from multiplicativity of the maximal channel output purity for all non-trace-preserving quantum channels, when purity is measured by Schatten $p$-norms for $p$ tending to 1.