We derive a trade-off relation between accuracy of implementing a desired unitary evolution using a restricted set of free unitaries and the size of the assisting system, in terms of the resource generating and losing capacity of the target unitary. In particular, this relation implies that, for any theory equipped with a resource measure satisfying lenient conditions, any resource changing unitary cannot be perfectly implemented by a free unitary applied to a system and an environment if the environment has finite dimensions. Our results are applicable to a wide class of resources including energy, asymmetry, coherence, entanglement, and magic, imposing ultimate limitations inherent in such important physical settings, as well as providing insights into operational restrictions in general resource theories.
We derive a trade-off relation between accuracy of implementing a desired unitary evolution using a restricted set of free unitaries and the size of the assisting system, in terms of the resource generating and losing capacity of the target unitary. In particular, this relation implies that, for any theory equipped with a resource measure satisfying lenient conditions, any resource changing unitary cannot be perfectly implemented by a free unitary applied to a system and an environment if the environment has finite dimensions. Our results are applicable to a wide class of resources including energy, asymmetry, coherence, entanglement, and magic, imposing ultimate limitations inherent in such important physical settings, as well as providing insights into operational restrictions in general resource theories.
Considerable work has recently been directed toward developing resource theories of quantum coherence. In this Letter, we establish a criterion of physical consistency for any resource theory. This criterion requires that all free operations in a given resource theory be implementable by a unitary evolution and projective measurement that are both free operations in an extended resource theory. We show that all currently proposed basis-dependent theories of coherence fail to satisfy this criterion. We further characterize the physically consistent resource theory of coherence and find its operational power to be quite limited. After relaxing the condition of physical consistency, we introduce the class of dephasing-covariant incoherent operations as a natural generalization of the physically consistent operations. Necessary and sufficient conditions are derived for the convertibility of qubit states using dephasing-covariant operations, and we show that these conditions also hold for other well-known classes of incoherent operations.
We establish universal limitations on the manipulation of quantum channel resources under the most general, adaptive transformation protocols. Focusing in particular on the class of distillation tasks -- which can be understood either as the purification of noisy channels into unitary ones, or the extraction of state-based resources from channels -- we develop fundamental restrictions on the error necessarily incurred in such transformations, applicable to many different settings in general resource theories. We introduce comprehensive lower bounds for the overhead of any physical distillation protocol in terms of required channel uses, imposing strong limitations on the practical efficiency and cost of channel manipulation protocols. In the asymptotic setting, our results yield broadly applicable strong converse bounds for the rates of distillation. As a special case, our methods apply to the manipulation of quantum states, in which case they significantly improve on and extend the recent no-go theorems for resource purification in [Fang and Liu, Phys. Rev. Lett. 125, 060405 (2020)]. We demonstrate our results through explicit applications to quantum communication, where we recover in particular a number of strong converse bounds for the quantum capacity of channels assisted by various classes of operations, as well as to stabilizer quantum computation, where we study the precise quantitative links between magic state distillation and quantum gate synthesis, and provide improved bounds for both tasks.
Quantum technologies offer exceptional -- sometimes almost magical -- speed and performance, yet every quantum process costs physical resources. Designing next-generation quantum devices, therefore, depends on solving the following question: which resources, and in what amount, are required to implement a desired quantum process? Casting the problem in the language of quantum resource theories, we prove a universal cost-irreversibility tradeoff: the lower the irreversibility of a quantum process, the greater the required resource cost for its realization. The trade-off law holds for a broad range of resources -- energy, magic, asymmetry, coherence, athermality, and others -- yielding lower bounds on resource cost of any quantum channel. Its broad scope positions this result as a foundation for deriving the following key results: (1) we show a universal relation between the energetic cost and the irreversibility for arbitrary channels, encompassing the energy-error tradeoff for any measurement or unitary gate; (2) we extend the energy-error tradeoff to free energy and work costs; (3) we extend the Wigner-Araki-Yanase theorem, which is the universal limitation on measurements under conservation laws, to a wide class of resource theories: the probability of failure in distinguishing resourceful states via a measurement is inversely proportional to its resource cost; (4) we prove that infinitely many resource-non-increasing operations in fact require an infinite implementation cost. These findings reveal a universal relationship between quantumness and irreversibility, providing a first step toward a general theory that explains when -- and how -- quantumness can suppress irreversibility.
A perfect d-dimensional quantum channel can convey log d-bits of classical information by encoding messages in d-orthogonal quantum states. Alternatively, for every quantum state at the senders end, there exist d-encoding operations which produce d-orthogonal quantum states. Transmitting which via a d-level perfect quantum channel it is possible to communicate log d-bits of classical information. But what if the set of encoding operations is restricted only within a physically constrained class? Here, we consider such a class of encoding operations to be the set of free operations for any quantum resource theory and show that the constrained capacity - namely, the free encoding capacity (FEC) emerged as a unit of the corresponding quantum resource. Moreover, we show that for the pointed resource theories - a resource theory admitting only a single free state - FEC becomes a faithful resource measure also. We also discuss the implications of FEC in the question of resource-theoretic state transformations and the possibility of extending its faithfulness for general quantum resource theories.
Resource theories provide a universal framework for quantifying properties of quantum states, such as entanglement, magic, athermality, and asymmetry, as resources under various constraints encountered in quantum science. Since realistic settings typically impose several constraints at once, it is important to study multi-resource theories that combine them. Among these, combinations with asymmetry are especially natural, as symmetry is fundamental and ubiquitous in physics. Here we develop a general theory that treats combinations of finite-group asymmetry with a broad range of resource theories in a unified manner. Our key observation is that the effect of combining the two constraints is governed by the accessibility of symmetry information under the underlying resource theory: whether the information needed for the conversion can be extracted from the input and used to control free operations. If this can be done with asymptotically vanishing error, we show that the conversion rate of the combined theory equals the smaller of the rates of the two constituent theories, so combining them incurs no additional cost. This condition holds for LOCC on arbitrary mixed multipartite states, magic-state conversion of multiqubit systems under Clifford symmetries, and Gibbs-preserving operations. Thermal operations, being time-translation covariant, can access only limited symmetry information, giving an additional compatibility condition between the two symmetries. We also analyze symmetry imposed on elementary operations rather than only on the resulting channel. We establish analogous results for LOCC and thermal operations under suitable assumptions, and for magic when the symmetry is represented by Pauli operators. Finally, we show that finite-group symmetry does not reduce the asymptotic ergotropy per copy and hence introduces no new completely passive states.
Quantum resource theories provide a unified theoretical framework for understanding inherent quantum-mechanical properties that serve as resources in quantum information processing. State conversion can be implemented by free operations. The partial trace and the incoherent operation, similarly to the local operation and classical communication, are all free operations in the corresponding quantum resource theory. This work mainly studies the limitations of these two types of free operations: (1) Masking information is a protocol that encodes quantum information into a bipartite correlated state while the information is completely unknown to local systems. While the no-masking theorem turns out that it is not possible to determinately mask arbitrary quantum states, quantum information in certain restricted sets of states can be masked. We consider the new regime of probabilistic and approximate masking quantum information. Here, the goal is to mask a set of quantum states with maximal probability, allowing for a small error in the masking. And we provide limits on both the fidelity and the probability of masking, and derive limitations on the masking of quantum information by providing bounds on the maximal masking fidelity. (2) From quantum sensors to quantum computers, many technologies require quantum resources. The properties of such states are coherent or correlated in a way that would not be possible in classical physics. Ideally, for technology applications, these states should be in the so-called maximally resource state, one in which all possible measures of quantum resource are maximized. In a quantum system with noise, an important question is whether there exists maximal resource states. This work answered this important quantum question with a negative answer, i.e., there are no maximal resource states in general. In order to do so, this work considers the case of rank-2 states and shows that for particular values of the eigenvalues, there exists no state that can be transformed to all other states under free operations. This in particular implies that in these cases the state that maximizes a given resource measure among all states depends on the choice of resource measure, i.e., it cannot be that the aforementioned family of states maximizes all resource measures.