Tightening Continuity Bounds for Entropies and Bounds on Quantum Capacities

Uniform continuity bounds on entropies are generally expressed in terms of a single distance measure between probability distributions or quantum states, typically, the total variation- or trace distance. However, if an additional distance measure is known, the continuity bounds can be significantly strengthened. Here, we prove a tight uniform continuity bound for the Shannon entropy in terms of both the local- and total variation distances, sharpening an inequality in (Sason, 2013). We also obtain a uniform continuity bound for the von Neumann entropy in terms of both the operator norm- and trace distances. We then apply our results to compute upper bounds on channel capacities. We first refine the concept of approximate degradable channels by introducing $(\varepsilon ,\nu)$ –degradable channels. These are $\varepsilon $ –close in diamond norm and $\nu $ –close in completely bounded spectral norm to their complementary channel when composed with a degrading channel. This leads to improved upper bounds to the quantum- and private classical capacities of such channels. Moreover, these bounds can be further improved by considering certain unstabilized versions of the above norms. We show that upper bounds on the latter can be efficiently expressed as semidefinite programs. As an application, we obtain a new upper bound on the quantum capacity of the qubit depolarizing channel.