In this paper, we consider two extensions of the Gács-Körner common information to three variables, theconditional common information(cCI) and thecoarse-grained conditional common information(ccCI). Both quantities are shown to be useful technical tools in the study of classical and quantum resource transformations. In particular, the ccCI is shown to have an operational interpretation as the optimal rate of secret key extraction from an eavesdropped classical sourcepXYZwhen Alice (X) and Bob (Y) are unable to communicate but share common randomness with the eavesdropper Eve (Z). Moving to the quantum setting, we consider two different ways of generating a tripartite quantum state from classical correlationspXYZ: (1) coherent encodings Σxyz√(pxyz)|xyz> and (2) incoherent encodings Σxyzpxyz|xyz>xyz|. We study how well can Alice and Bob extract secret key from these quantum sources using quantum operations compared with the extraction of key from the underlying classical sourcespXYZusing classical operations. While the power of quantum mechanics increases Alice and Bob's ability to generate shared randomness, it also equips Eve with a greater arsenal of eavesdropping attacks. Therefore, it is not obvious who gains the greatest advantage for distilling secret key when replacing a classical source with a quantum one. We first demonstrate that the classical key rate ofpXYZis equivalent to the quantum key rate for an incoherent quantum encoding of the distribution. For coherent encodings, we next show that the classical and quantum rates are generally incomparable, and in fact, their difference can be arbitrarily large in either direction. Finally, we introduce a “zoo” of entangled tripartite states all characterized by the conditional common information of their encoded probability distributions. Remarkably, for these states almost all entanglement measures, such as Alice and Bob's entanglement cost, squashed entanglement, and relative entropy of entanglement, can be sharply bounded or even exactly expressed in terms of the conditional common information. In the latter case, we thus present a rare instance in which the various entropic entanglement measures of a quantum state can be explicitly calculated.

We demonstrate a new construction for perfect quantum secret sharing (QSS) schemes based on imperfect “ramp” secret sharing combined with classical encryption, in which the individual parties' shares are split into quantum and classical components, allowing the former to be of lower dimension than the secret itself. We show that such schemes can be performed with smaller quantum components and lower overall quantum communication than required for existing methods. We further demonstrate that one may combine both imperfect quantum and imperfect classical secret sharing to produce an overall perfect QSS scheme, and that examples of such schemes (which we construct) can have the smallest quantum and classical share components possible for their access structures, something provably not achievable using perfect underlying schemes. Our construction has significant potential for being adapted to other QSS schemes based on stabilizer codes.

We present explicit bounds on the classical communication cost and inefficiency of entanglement dilution via the Lo-Popescu protocol, for the case of two-term (single-qubit) entangled states. By considering a two-stage dilution, we consequently use prior results to obtain meaningful bounds on the classical communication cost and inefficiency of dilution between two-term partially entangled states.