The coherence of an individual quantum state can be meaningfully discussed only when referring to a preferred basis. This arbitrariness can, however, be lifted when considering sets of quantum states. Here we introduce the concept of set coherence for characterizing the coherence of a set of quantum systems in a basis-independent way. We construct measures for quantifying set coherence of sets of quantum states as well as quantum measurements. These measures feature an operational meaning in terms of discrimination games and capture precisely the advantage offered by a given set over incoherent ones. Along the way, we also connect the notion of set coherence to various resource-theoretic approaches recently developed for quantum systems.
The coherence of an individual quantum state can be meaningfully discussed only when referring to a preferred basis. This arbitrariness can, however, be lifted when considering sets of quantum states. Here we introduce the concept of set coherence for characterizing the coherence of a set of quantum systems in a basis-independent way. We construct measures for quantifying set coherence of sets of quantum states as well as quantum measurements. These measures feature an operational meaning in terms of discrimination games and capture precisely the advantage offered by a given set over incoherent ones. Along the way, we also connect the notion of set coherence to various resource-theoretic approaches recently developed for quantum systems.
In the quantitative theory of quantum coherence, the amount of coherence for given states can be meaningfully discussed only when referring to a preferred basis. One of the objections to this quantification is that the amount of coherence is an intrinsically basis-dependent quantity. This limitation can, however, be lifted when considering a set of quantum states invariant under arbitrary unitary transformations. Thus, we analyze a basis-independent definition of quantum coherence, and the incoherent state is taken as the maximally mixed state. We describe the relationship between the basis-independent and the basis-dependent approaches and give several applications to show the advantages of the former method. The relations among basis-independent coherence, quantum entanglement, and quantum discord are discussed by using the relative entropy within a multipartite system.
In the quantitative theory of quantum coherence, the amount of coherence is defined as the distance between the given state to the closest incoherent state. The set of incoherent states is conventionally defined as any state with a diagonal density matrix. One of the objections to this formulation is that the incoherent states are intrinsically basis-dependent, which makes the amount of coherence also a basis-dependent quantity. Basis-independent measures have recently been proposed where the incoherent state is taken as the maximally mixed state. We show that this is the only possible choice of reference incoherent state, without modifying the original definition of coherence. We find a relation between the two formulations by defining a contribution to the coherence due to the basis choice. The hierarchical relationship between quantum coherence and the various quantum correlations is explored in detail. Finally, we illustrate some operational uses of the basis-independent quantum coherence in quantum information theory tasks.
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 In this work we investigate how to quantify the coherence of quantum measurements. First, we establish a resource theoretical framework to address the coherence of measurement and show that any statistical distance can be adopted to define a coherence monotone of measurement. For instance, the relative entropy fulfills all the required properties as a proper monotone. We specifically introduce a coherence monotone of measurement in terms of off-diagonal elements of positive-operator-valued measure components. This quantification provides a lower bound on the robustness of measurement-coherence that has an operational meaning as the maximal advantage over all incoherent measurements in state discrimination tasks. Finally, we propose an experimental scheme to assess our quantification of measurement-coherence and demonstrate it by performing an experiment using a single qubit on IBM Q processor.
Quantum coherence, present whenever a quantum system exists in a superposition of multiple classically distinct states, marks one of the fundamental departures from classical physics.Quantum coherence has recently been investigated rigorously within a resource-theoretic formalism.However, the finer-grained notion of multilevel coherence, which explicitly takes into account the number of superposed classical states, has remained relatively unexplored.A comprehensive analysis of multilevel coherence, which acts as the singleparty analogue to multipartite entanglement, is essential for understanding natural quantum processes as well as for gauging the performance of quantum technologies.Here, we develop the theoretical and experimental groundwork for characterizing and quantifying multilevel coherence.We prove that nontrivial levels of purity are required for multilevel coherence, as there is a ball of states around the maximally mixed state that do not exhibit multilevel coherence in any basis.We provide a simple, necessary, and sufficient analytical criterion to verify the presence of multilevel coherence, which leads to a complete classification of multilevel coherence for three-level systems.We present the robustness of multilevel coherence, a bona fide quantifier, which we show to be numerically computable via semidefinite programming and experimentally accessible via multilevel coherence witnesses, which we introduce and characterize.We further verify and lower bound the robustness of multilevel coherence by performing a semi-device-independent phase discrimination task, which is implemented experimentally with four-level quantum probes in a photonic setup.Our results contribute to understanding the operational relevance of genuine multilevel coherence, also by demonstrating the key role it plays in enhanced phase discrimination-a primitive for quantum communication and metrology-and suggest new ways to reliably and effectively test the quantum behavior of physical systems.
Recently, how to measure quantum coherence is a hot topic in the quantum resource theory. In 2014, Baumgratz et al. proposed a rigorous framework to quantify coherence. In this framework, a particular basis of the Hilbert space is required to define the coherence measure, and hence, the proposed coherence measure of the same quantum state does not remain the same under the basis transformations. In this paper, a measure of coherence based on the normalized modulus of the coherent vector is proposed in coherent vector representation, where the property of the coherent vector under basis transformation is considered. The measure of coherence proposed here is independent of the choice of the basis. The incoherent states and incoherent operators based on this measure can also be well defined as the classical maximal mixed states and the unitary operators respectively. And three important properties can be obtained, namely, non-negativity, convexity and invariance on the incoherent operators.