This paper proposes and studies new quantum version of $f$-divergences, a class of convex functionals of a pair of probability distributions including Kullback-Leibler divergence, Rnyi-type relative entropy and so on. There are several quantum versions so far, including the one by Petz. We introduce another quantum version ($\mathrm{ D}_{ f}^{ \max}$, below), defined as the solution to an optimization problem, or the minimum classical $f$- divergence necessary to generate a given pair of quantum states. It turns out to be the largest quantum $f$-divergence. The closed formula of $\mathrm{ D}_{ f}^{ \max}$ is given either if $f$ is operator convex, or if one of the state is a pure state. Also, concise representation of $\mathrm{ D}_{ f}^{ \max}$ as a pointwise supremum of linear functionals is given and used for the clarification of various properties of the quality. Using the closed formula of $\mathrm{ D}_{ f}^{ \max}$, we show: Suppose $f$ is operator convex. Then the\ maximum $f\,$- divergence of the probability distributions of a measurement under the state $\rho$ and $\sigma$ is strictly less than $\mathrm{ D}_{ f}^{ \max}\left( \rho\Vert\sigma\right) $. This statement may seem intuitively trivial, but when $f$ is not operator convex, this is not always true. A counter example is $f\left( \lambda\right) =\left\vert 1-\lambda\right\vert $, which corresponds to total variation distance. We mostly work on finite dimensional Hilbert space, but some results are extended to infinite dimensional case.
Categories: quant-ph