Some Issues in Quantum Information Theory

Quantum information theory is a new interdisciplinary research fieldrelated to quantum mechanics, computer science, information theory,and applied mathematics. It provides completely new paradigms to doinformation processing tasks by employing the principles of quantummechanics. In this review, we first survey some of the significantadvances in quantum information theory in the last twenty years. Wethen focus mainly on two special subjects: discrimination of quantumobjects and transformations between entanglements. Morespecifically, we first discuss discrimination of quantum states andquantum apparatus in both global and local settings. Secondly, wepresent systematical characterizations and equivalence relations ofseveral interesting entanglement transformation phenomena, namelyentanglement catalysis, multiple-copy entanglement transformation,and partial entanglement recovery.