  In most communication schemes information is transmitted via travelling modes
of electromagnetic radiation. These modes are unavoidably subject to
environmental noise along any physical transmission medium and the quality of
the communication channel strongly depends on the minimum noise achievable at
the output. For classical signals such noise can be rigorously quantified in
terms of the associated Shannon entropy and it is subject to a fundamental
lower bound called entropy power inequality. Electromagnetic fields are however
quantum mechanical systems and then, especially in low intensity signals, the
quantum nature of the information carrier cannot be neglected and many
important results derived within classical information theory require
non-trivial extensions to the quantum regime. Here we prove one possible
generalization of the Entropy Power Inequality to quantum bosonic systems. The
impact of this inequality in quantum information theory is potentially large
and some relevant implications are considered in this work.
