Probabilistic interpretation of the reduction criterion for entanglement

Inspired by the idea of conditional probabilities, we introduce a variant of conditional density operators. But unlike the conditional probabilities which are bounded by 1, the conditional density operators may have eigenvalues exceeding 1 for entangled states. This has the consequence that although any bivariate classical probability distribution has a natural separable decomposition in terms of conditional probabilities, we do not have a quantum analogue of this separable decomposition in general. The “nonclassical” eigenvalues of conditional density operators are indications of entanglement. The resulting separability criterion turns out to be equivalent to the reduction criterion introduced by Horodecki Phys. Rev. A 59 4206 (1999)] and Cerf et al. Phys. Rev. A 60 898 (1999)]. This supplies an intuitive probabilistic interpretation for the reduction criterion. The conditional density operators are also used to define a form of quantum conditional entropy which provides an alternative mechanism to reveal quantum discord.