We consider quantum devices for turning a finite number N of d-level quantum systems in the same unknown pure state σ into M > N systems of the same kind, in an approximation of the Mfold tensor product of the state σ. In a previous paper it was shown that this problem has a unique optimal solution, when the quality of the output is judged by arbitrary measurements, involving also the correlations between the clones. We show in this paper, that if the quality judgement is based solely on measurements of single output clones, there is again a unique optimal cloning device, which coincides with the one found previously.

Given N quantum systems prepared according to the same density operator ρ, we propose a measurement on the N -fold system which approximately yields the spectrum of ρ. The projections of the proposed observable decompose the Hilbert space according to the irreducible representations of the permutations on N points, and are labeled by Young frames, whose relative row lengths estimate the eigenvalues of ρ in decreasing order. We show convergence of these estimates in the limit N → ∞, and that the probability for errors decreases exponentially with a rate we compute explicitly.

In this paper we give a self contained introduction to the conceptional and mathematical foundations of quantum information theory. In the first part we introduce the basic notions like entanglement, channels, teleportation etc. and their mathematical description. The second part is focused on a presentation of the quantitative aspects of the theory. Topics discussed in this context include: entanglement measures, channel capacities, relations between both, additivity and continuity properties and asymptotic rates of quantum operations. Finally we give an overview on some recent developments and open questions.

In quantum mechanics the statistics of the outcomes of a measuring apparatus is described by a positive operator valued measure (POVM). A quantum channel transforms POVM's into POVM's, generally irreversibly, thus loosing some of the information retrieved from the measurement. This poses the problem of which POVM's are "undisturbed", namely they are not irreversibly connected to another POVM. We will call such POVM's clean. In a sense, the clean POVM's would be "perfect", since they would not have any additional "extrinsical" noise. Quite unexpectedly, it turns out that such cleanness property is largely unrelated to the convex structure of POVM's, and there are clean POVM's that are not extremal and vice-versa. In this paper we solve the cleannes classification problem for number n of outcomes n ≤ d (d dimension of the Hilbert space), and we provide a a set of either necessary or sufficient conditions for n > d, along with an iff condition for the case of informationally complete POVM's for n = d 2 .

For states in infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces entanglement quantities like the entanglement of distillation can become infinite. This leads naturally to the question, whether one system in such an infinitely entangled state can serve as a resource for tasks like the teleportation of arbitrarily many qubits. We show that appropriate states cannot be obtained by density operators in an infinite dimensional Hilbert space. However, using techniques for the description of infinitely many degrees of freedom from field theory and statistical mechanics, such states can nevertheless be constructed rigorously. We explore two related possibilities, namely an extended notion of algebras of observables, and the use of singular states on the algebra of bounded operators. As applications we construct the essentially unique infinite analogue of maximally entangled states, and the singular state used heuristically in the fundamental paper of Einstein, Rosen and Podolsky.