Quantum information measures for restricted sets of observables

Abstract

We study measures of quantum information when the space spanned by the set of accessible observables is not closed under products, i.e., we consider systems where an observer may be able to measure the expectation values of two operators, $\langle O_1 \rangle$ and $\langle O_2 \rangle$, but may not have access to $\langle O_1 O_2 \rangle$. This problem is relevant for the study of localized quantum information in gravity since the set of approximately-local operators in a region may not be closed under arbitrary products. While we cannot naturally associate a density matrix with a state in this setting, it is still possible to define a modular operator for a state, and distinguish between two states using a relative modular operator. These operators are defined on a little Hilbert space, which parameterizes small deformations of the system away from its original state, and they do not depend on the structure of the full Hilbert space of the theory. We extract a class of relative-entropy-like quantities from the spectrum of these operators that measure the distance between states, are monotonic under contractions of the set of available observables, and vanish only when the states are equal. Consequently, these distance-measures can be used to define measures of bipartite and multipartite entanglement. We describe applications of our measures to coarse-grained and fine-grained subregion dualities in AdS/CFT and provide a few sample calculations to illustrate our formalism.