Quantum coherence is a fundamental aspect of quantum physics and plays a central role in quantum information science. This essential property of the quantum states could be fragile under the influence of the quantum operations. The extent to which quantum coherence is diminished depends both on the channel and the incoherent basis. Motivated by this, we propose a measure of nonclassicality of a quantum channel as the average quantum coherence of the state space after the channel acts on, minimized over all orthonormal basis sets of the state space. Utilizing the squared ${l}_{1}$-norm of coherence for the qubit channels, the minimization can be treated analytically and the proposed measure takes a closed form of expression. If we allow the channels to act locally on a maximally entangled state, the quantum correlation is diminished making the states more classical. We show that the extent to which quantum correlation is preserved under local action of the channel cannot exceed the quantumness of the underlying channel. We further apply our measure to the quantum teleportation protocol and show that a nonzero quantumness for the underlying channel provides a necessary condition to overcome the best classical protocols.
Quantum coherence is a fundamental aspect of quantum physics and plays a central role in quantum information science. This essential property of the quantum states could be fragile under the influence of the quantum operations. The extent to which quantum coherence is diminished depends both on the channel and the incoherent basis. Motivated by this, we propose a measure of nonclassicality of a quantum channel as the average quantum coherence of the state space after the channel acts on, minimized over all orthonormal basis sets of the state space. Utilizing the squared l1-norm of coherence for the qubit channels, the minimization can be treated analytically and the proposed measure takes a closed form of expression. If we allow the channels to act locally on a maximally entangled state, the quantum correlation is diminished making the states more classical. We show that the extent to which quantum correlation is preserved under local action of the channel cannot exceed the quantumness of the underlying channel. We further apply our measure to the quantum teleportation protocol and show that a nonzero quantumness for the underlying channel provides a necessary condition to overcome the best classical protocols.
Quantum Coherence (QC) has a fundamental role in Quantum Mechanics (QM). It has been studied since the emergence of QM. However, this quantum feature is easily destroyed when a physical system interacts with the environment. Also, recently the quantum coherence has been highlighted because of the possibility of using its as a resource in the Quantum Information Science (QIS). In this work we study the QC flow of a qubit (two-level system) interacting with the environment modeled by quantum channels of noise that are very common in QIS. These channels represent some physical systems and are widely used for error correction studies. We calculate the QC by the l1-norm, doing this for the different channels seeking to relate it to the entanglement, which is also another key topic in QM. We note that in the amplitude damping channel the total QC is equal to the sum of the local and non-local parts and that the non-local part is equivalent to entanglement. For the phase damping channel, entanglement does not cover all non-local QC. Here there is a gap between them that may depend on the time and on the initial state. Besides, for the bit, phase, and bit phase flip channels the possibility and the conditions for invariance of QC are considered. Also, we notice that for the depolarizing channel we can use the qubit as a catalyst for the creation of non-local QC and entanglement. We, as well, observed that even initial states incoherent can lead to transient quantum coherence between system and environment. We also showed that the emergence of entanglement does not necessarily imply the destruction of QC. Furthermore, we investigated whether QC is lost or changed into other types of correlations and besides which initial conditions allow making quantum coherence robust to decoherence.
Set coherence is a quantum resource for a set of states that characterizes whether a collection of quantum states contains coherence, namely whether these states fail to be simultaneously incoherent in a common basis. In this work, we show that the free operations of set coherence are common commutativity-preserving quantum channels, from which we then establish an axiomatic framework for set-coherence measure (SCM). Within this framework, we investigate the robustness based measures deduced by taking, respectively, the average, maximum, and sum of the single-state robustnesses over a common reference basis, where the first two were previously introduced in the literature and we check here whether they satisfy our SCM axioms. Consequently, we show that the averaged robustness is an SCM but it is neither unified nor complete, the maximal robustness is a unified SCM but is neither complete nor strongly superadditive, whereas the sum robustness is a complete SCM. Furthermore, we propose several classes of SCMs based on pairwise commutators. We show that the Schatten p-norm based SCMs are complete and strongly superadditive. We also find that the universal fourth-order Bargmann gap measure proposed in the literature is a complete and strongly superadditive quantifier of set coherence. Finally, we discuss the operational meaning of the SCM in the context of optimal approximate quantum broadcasting, and show that the amount of set coherence can closely reflect the performance of this task.
Abstract Quantum information theory is built upon the realisation that quantum resources like coherence and entanglement can be exploited for novel or enhanced ways of transmitting and manipulating information, such as quantum cryptography, teleportation, and quantum computing. We now know that there is potentially much more than entanglement behind the power of quantum information processing. There exist more general forms of non-classical correlations, stemming from fundamental principles such as the necessary disturbance induced by a local measurement, or the persistence of quantum coherence in all possible local bases. These signatures can be identified and are resilient in almost all quantum states, and have been linked to the enhanced performance of certain quantum protocols over classical ones in noisy conditions. Their presence represents, among other things, one of the most essential manifestations of quantumness in cooperative systems, from the subatomic to the macroscopic domain. In this work we give an overview of the current quest for a proper understanding and characterisation of the frontier between classical and quantum correlations (QCs) in composite states. We focus on various approaches to define and quantify general QCs, based on different yet interlinked physical perspectives, and comment on the operational significance of the ensuing measures for quantum technology tasks such as information encoding, distribution, discrimination and metrology. We then provide a broader outlook of a few applications in which quantumness beyond entanglement looks fit to play a key role.
Informationally complete (IC) measurements are a useful class of measurements, as their outcome statistics uniquely determine an unknown quantum state. Hence, they are important for certain tasks such as quantum state tomography, quantum process tomography, etc. In this work, we study the quantification of informational completeness for arbitrary quantum measurements by introducing and characterizing a faithful measure for it. We explicitly evaluate the informational completeness of qubit symmetric informationally complete (SIC) measurements and show that it is an upper bound for all qubit minimal informationally complete measurements. Furthermore, by introducing a faithful measure, we try to quantify and characterize the ability of an arbitrary quantum channel to preserve the informational completeness of any IC measurement when the channel acts on it in the Heisenberg picture. We call this measure informational completeness-preservability (IC preservability) of quantum channels. After studying its properties, we establish its relation to another quantity, namely, the absolute output coherence of a quantum channel, which quantifies the minimum amount of coherence (w.r.t. an arbitrary incoherent basis) that can always be obtained from the output of that channel. Finally, we illustrate our results with an example from light-matter interaction scenarios. Thus, in this work, not only do we try to provide a quantitative framework for studying both the informational completeness of quantum measurements and the ability of quantum channels to preserve it, but we also try to offer key insight into the conceptual relation between informational completeness and quantum coherence.
Coherence is the most fundamental quantum feature in quantum mechanics. For a bipartite quantum state, if a measurement is performed on one party, the other party, based on the measurement outcomes, will collapse to a corresponding state with some probability and hence gain the average coherence. It is shown that the average coherence is not less than the coherence of its reduced density matrix. In particular, it is very surprising that the extra average coherence (and the maximal extra average coherence with all the possible measurements taken into account) is upper bounded by the classical correlation of the bipartite state instead of the quantum correlation. We also find the sufficient and necessary condition for the null maximal extra average coherence. Some examples demonstrate the relation and, moreover, show that quantum correlation is neither sufficient nor necessary for the nonzero extra average coherence within a given measurement. In addition, the similar conclusions are drawn for both the basis-dependent and the basis-free coherence measure.
Lying at the heart of quantum mechanics, coherence has recently been studied as a key resource in quantum information theory. Quantum steering, a fundamental notion originally considered by Schödinger, has also recently received much attention. When Alice and Bob share a correlated quantum system, Alice can perform a local measurement to 'steer' Bob's reduced state. We introduce the maximal steered coherence as a measure describing the extent to which steering can remotely create coherence; more precisely, we find the maximal coherence of Bob's steered state in the eigenbasis of his original reduced state, where maximization is performed over all positive-operator valued measurements for Alice. We prove that maximal steered coherence vanishes for quantum-classical states whilst reaching a maximum for pure entangled states with full Schmidt rank. Although invariant under local unitary operations, maximal steered coherence may be increased when Bob performs a channel. For a two-qubit state we find that Bob's channel can increase maximal steered coherence if and only if it is neither unital nor semi-classical, which coincides with the condition for increasing discord. Our results show that the power of steering for coherence generation, though related to discord, is distinct from existing measures of quantum correlation.