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arXiv · 2610.06741

Free entropy and quantum minimum description length

Patrick Hayden·Alexander Maloney·Jinzhao Wang·Yuxiang Yang
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Abstract

In free probability, Voiculescu's free entropy counts matrix microstates that approximate an operator. It is a non-commutative analog of the Shannon entropy, distinct from any quantum entropy of a density operator, but it has had no physical meaning in quantum theory. We define a finite-dimensional physical free entropy at finite resolution and show that it directly characterizes, up to an explicit constant, the minimal quantum memory needed to program many copies of a state with known eigenvalues and unknown eigenbasis. This task is a variant of Schumacher compression, and we call its optimal cost the quantum minimum description length. We briefly discuss how free entropy differs from quantum entropies and its potential applications in quantum physics.

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Patrick Hayden, Alexander Maloney, Jinzhao Wang, Yuxiang Yang. 2026-10-05. Free entropy and quantum minimum description length. https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.06741

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