The information transfer in the system-apparatus-environment trio is of fundamental importance for both the theory and practice of quantum information. Based on a canonical joint purification which encodes the system, apparatus, and environment as well as their interplay, we establish several basic relations involving various entropies arising from the most general quantum measurements. Some celebrated results concerning entropy change and information-disturbance tradeoff are recaptured as particular cases in a unified framework of information conservation.

• Received 18 August 2010

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.82.052103