Variations on classical and quantum extractors

Abstract

Many constructions of randomness extractors are known to work in the presence of quantum side information, but there also exist extractors which do not [Gavinsky et al., STOC'07]. Here we find that spectral extractors with a bound on the second largest eigenvalue - considered as an operator on the Hilbert-Schmidt class - are quantum-proof. We then discuss fully quantum extractors and call constructions that also work in the presence of quantum correlations decoupling. As in the classical case we show that spectral extractors are decoupling. The drawback of classical and quantum spectral extractors is that they always have a long seed, whereas there exist classical extractors with exponentially smaller seed size. For the quantum case, we show that there exists an extractor with extremely short seed size d = O(log(1/ε)), where ε > 0 denotes the quality of the randomness. In contrast to the classical case this is independent of the input size and min-entropy and matches the simple lower bound d ≥ log(1/ε).