We explain how the classical notions of Fisher information of a random variable and Fisher information matrix of a random vector can be extended to a much broader setting. We also show that Stam’s inequality for Fisher information and Shannon entropy, as well as the more generalized versions proved earlier by the authors, are all special cases of more general sharp inequalities satisfied by random vectors. The extremal random vectors, which we call generalized Gaussians, contain Gaussians as a limiting case but are noteworthy because they are heavy- tailed.

The p-th moment matrix is defined for a real random vector, generalizing the classical covariance matrix. Sharp inequalities relating the p-th moment and Renyi entropy are established, generalizing the classical inequality relating the second moment and the Shannon entropy. The extremal distributions for these inequalities are completely characterized.

For a random quantum state on $\cH=\C^d \otimes \C^d$ obtained by partial tracing a random pure state on $\cH \otimes \C^s$, we consider the question whether it is typically separable or typically entangled. For this problem, we show the existence of a sharp threshold $s_0=s_0(d)$ of order roughly $d^3$. More precisely, for any $\e>0$ and for $d$ large enough, such a random state is entangled with very large probability when $s \leq (1-\e)s_0$, and separable with very large probability when $s \geq (1+\e) s_0$. One consequence of this result is as follows: for a system of $N$ identical particles in a random pure state, there is a threshold $k_0 = k_0(N)\sim N/5$ such that two subsystems of $k$ particles each typically share entanglement if $k>k_0$, and typically do not share entanglement if $k<k_0$. Our methods work also for multipartite systems and for ``unbalanced'' systems such as $\C^{d_1} \otimes \C^{d_2} $, ${d_1} \neq {d_2} $. The arguments rely on random matrices, classical convexity, high-dimensional probability and geometry of Banach spaces; some of the auxiliary results may be of reference value.

entangled states. We construct sets of fewer than d orthogonal maximally entangled states which are not distinguished by one-way local operations and classical communication (LOCC) in the Hilbert space of d ⊗ d. The proof, based on the Fourier transform of an additive group, is very simple but quite effective. Simultaneously, our results give a general unified upper bound for the minimum number of one-way LOCC indistinguishable maximally entangled states. This improves previous results which only showed sets of N  d − 2 such states. Finally, our results also show that previous conjectures in Zhang et al. [Z.-C. Zhang, Q.-Y. Wen, F. Gao, G.-J. Tian, and T.-Q. Cao, Quant. Info. Proc. 13, 795 (2014)] are indeed correct.

We establish necessary and sufficient conditions for consistent root reconstruction in continuous-time Markov models with countable state space on bounded-height trees. Here a root state estimator is said to be consistent if the probability that it returns to the true root state converges to 1 as the number of leaves tends to infinity. We also derive quantitative bounds on the error of reconstruction. Our results answer a question of Gascuel and Steel [GS10] and have implications for ancestral sequence reconstruction in a classical evolutionary model of nucleotide insertion and deletion [TKF91].