Eric Chitambar: Round complexity in the local transformations of quantum and classical state
1A natural operational paradigm for distributed quantum and classical information processing involves local operations coordinated by multiple rounds of public communication. In this paper we consider the minimum number of communication rounds needed to perform the locality-constrained task of entanglement transformation and the analogous classical task of secrecy manipulation. Specifically we address whether bipartite mixed entanglement can always be converted into pure entanglement or whether unsecure classical correlations can always be transformed into secret shared randomness using local operations and a \textit{bounded} number of communication exchanges. Our main contribution in this paper is an explicit construction of quantum and classical state transformations which, for any given $r$, can be achieved using $r$ rounds of classical communication exchanges but no fewer. Our results reveal that highly complex communication protocols are indeed necessary to fully harness the information-theoretic resources contained in general quantum and classical states. The major technical contribution of this manuscript lies in proving lower bounds for the required number of communication exchanges using the notion of common information and various lemmas built upon it.