Uncertainty, monogamy, and locking of quantum correlations

Squashed entanglement and entanglement of purification are quantum-mechanical correlation measures and are defined as certain minimizations of entropic quantities. In this paper, we present the first nontrivial calculations of both quantities. Our results lead to the conclusion that both measures can drop by an arbitrary amount when only a single qubit of a local system is lost. This property is known as locking and has previously been observed for other correlation measures such as accessible information, entanglement cost, and logarithmic negativity. In the case of squashed entanglement, the results are obtained using an inequality that can be understood as a quantum channel analogue of well-known entropic uncertainty relations. This inequality may prove a useful tool in quantum information theory. The regularized entanglement of purification is known to equal the entanglement needed to prepare many copies of a quantum state by local operations and a sublinear amount of communication. Here, monogamy of quantum entanglement (i.e., the impossibility of a system being maximally entangled with two others at the same time) leads to an exact calculation for all quantum states that are supported either on the symmetric or on the antisymmetric subspace of a d x d-dimensional system.