Abstract
We consider the most general (finite-dimensional) quantum mechanical information source, which is given by a quantum system that is correlated with a reference system . The task is to compress in such a way as to reproduce the joint source state at the decoder with asymptotically high fidelity. This includes Schumacher's original quantum source coding problem of a pure state ensemble and that of a single pure entangled state, as well as general mixed state ensembles. Here, we determine the optimal compression rate (in qubits per source system) in terms of the Koashi-Imoto decomposition of the source into a classical, a quantum, and a redundant part. The same decomposition yields the optimal rate in the presence of unlimited entanglement between compressor and decoder, and indeed the full region of feasible qubit-ebit rate pairs.