Exponent in Smoothing the Max-Relative Entropy and Its Application to Quantum Privacy Amplification

The max-relative entropy together with its smoothed version is a basic tool in quantum information theory. In this paper, we derive the exact exponent for the decay of the small modification of the quantum state in smoothing the max-relative entropy. We then apply this result to the problem of privacy amplification against quantum side information, and we obtain an upper bound for the exponent of the decreasing of the insecurity, measured using either purified distance or relative entropy. Our upper bound complements the earlier lower bound established by Hayashi, and the two bounds match when the rate of randomness extraction is above a critical value. Thus, for the case of high rate, we have determined the exact security exponent. Following this, we give examples and show that in the low-rate case, neither the upper bound nor the lower bound is tight in general. This exhibits a picture similar to that of the error exponent in channel coding.