A central question in resource theory is whether one can construct a set of monotones that completely characterise the allowed transitions dictated by a set of free operations. A similar question is whether two distinct sets of free operations generate the same class of transitions. These questions are part of the more general problem of whether it is possible to pass from one characterisation of a resource theory to another. In the present letter we prove that in the context of quantum resource theories this class of problems is undecidable in general. This is done by proving the undecidability of the membership problem for CPTP maps, which subsumes all the other results.
A central question in resource theory is whether one can construct a set of monotones that completely characterise the allowed transitions dictated by a set of free operations. A similar question is whether two distinct sets of free operations generate the same class of transitions. These questions are part of the more general problem of whether it is possible to pass from one characterisation of a resource theory to another. In the present letter we prove that in the context of quantum resource theories this class of problems is undecidable in general. This is done by proving the undecidability of the membership problem for CPTP maps, which subsumes all the other results.
A central question in resource theory is whether one can construct a set of monotones that completely characterize the allowed transitions dictated by a set of free operations. A similar question is whether two distinct sets of free operations generate the same class of transitions. These questions are part of the more general problem of whether it is possible to pass from one characterization of a resource theory to another. In the present Letter, we prove that in the context of quantum resource theories this class of problem is undecidable in general. This is done by proving the undecidability of the membership problem for completely positive trace preserving maps, which subsumes all the other results.
A central problem in the study of resource theories is to find functions that are nonincreasing under resource conversions — termed monotones — in order to quantify resourcefulness. Various constructions of monotones appear in many different concrete resource theories. How general are these constructions? What are the necessary conditions on a resource theory for a given construction to be applicable? To answer these questions, we introduce a broad scheme for constructing monotones. It involves finding an order-preserving map from the preorder of resources of interest to a distinct preorder for which nontrivial monotones are previously known or can be more easily constructed; these monotones are then pulled back through the map. In one of the two main classes we study, the preorder of resources is mapped to a preorder of sets of resources, where the order relation is set inclusion, such that monotones can be defined via maximizing or minimizing the value of a function within these sets. In the other class, the preorder of resources is mapped to a preorder of tuples of resources, and one pulls back monotones that measure the amount of distinguishability of the different elements of the tuple (hence its information content). Monotones based on contractions arise naturally in the latter class, and, more surprisingly, so do weight and robustness measures. In addition to capturing many standard monotone constructions, our scheme also suggests significant generalizations of these. In order to properly capture the breadth of applicability of our results, we present them within a novel abstract framework for resource theories in which the notion of composition is independent of the types of the resources involved (i.e., whether they are states, channels, combs, etc.).
Many resource theories share an interesting property: An operation is free if and only if its renormalized Choi matrix is a free state. In this article, we refer to resource theories exhibiting this property as Choi-defined resource theories. We demonstrate how and under what conditions one can construct a Choi-defined resource theory, and we prove that when such a construction is possible, the free operations are all and only the completely resource-nongenerating operations. Moreover, we examine resource measures, a complete family of monotones, and conversion distances in such resource theories.
We initiate the systematic study of resource theories of quantum channels, i.e. of the dynamics that quantum systems undergo by completely positive maps, in abstracto: Resources are in principle all maps from one quantum system to another, but some maps are deemed free. The free maps are supposed to satisfy certain axioms, among them closure under tensor products, under composition and freeness of the identity map (the latter two say that the free maps form a monoid). The free maps act on the resources simply by tensor product and composition. This generalizes the much-studied resource theories of quantum states, and abolishes the distinction between resources (states) and the free maps, which act on the former, leaving only maps, divided into resource-full and resource-free ones. We discuss the axiomatic framework of quantifying channel resources, and show two general methods of constructing resource monotones of channels. Furthermore, we show that under mild regularity conditions, each resource theory of quantum channels has a distinguished monotone, the robustness (and its smoothed version), generalizing the analogous concept in resource theories of states. We give an operational interpretation of the log-robustness as the amount of heat dissipation (randomness) required for resource erasure by random reversible free maps, valid in broad classes of resource theories of quantum channels. Technically, this is based on an abstract version of the recent convex-split lemma, extended from its original domain of quantum states to ordered vector spaces with sufficiently well-behaved base norms (which includes the case of quantum channels with diamond norm or variants thereof). Finally, we remark on several key issues concerning the asymptotic theory.
We initiate the systematic study of resource theories of quantum channels, i.e. of the dynamics that quantum systems undergo by completely positive maps, in abstracto: Resources are in principle all maps from one quantum system to another, but some maps are deemed free. The free maps are supposed to satisfy certain axioms, among them closure under tensor products, under composition and freeness of the identity map (the latter two say that the free maps form a monoid). The free maps act on the resources simply by tensor product and composition. This generalizes the much-studied resource theories of quantum states, and abolishes the distinction between resources (states) and the free maps, which act on the former, leaving only maps, divided into resource-full and resource-free ones. We discuss the axiomatic framework of quantifying channel resources, and show two general methods of constructing resource monotones of channels. Furthermore, we show that under mild regularity conditions, each resource theory of quantum channels has a distinguished monotone, the robustness (and its smoothed version), generalizing the analogous concept in resource theories of states. We give an operational interpretation of the log-robustness as the amount of heat dissipation (randomness) required for resource erasure by random reversible free maps, valid in broad classes of resource theories of quantum channels. Technically, this is based on an abstract version of the recent convex-split lemma, extended from its original domain of quantum states to ordered vector spaces with sufficiently well-behaved base norms (which includes the case of quantum channels with diamond norm or variants thereof). Finally, we remark on several key issues concerning the asymptotic theory.
One of the main goals of any resource theory such as entanglement, quantum thermodynamics, quantum coherence, and asymmetry, is to find necessary and sufficient conditions that determine whether one resource can be converted to another by the set of free operations. Here we find such conditions for a large class of quantum resource theories which we call affine resource theories. Affine resource theories include the resource theories of athermality, asymmetry, and coherence, but not entanglement. Remarkably, the necessary and sufficient conditions can be expressed as a family of inequalities between resource monotones (quantifiers) that are given in terms of the conditional min-entropy. The set of free operations is taken to be (1) the maximal set (i.e., consists of all resource nongenerating quantum channels) or (2) the self-dual set of free operations (i.e., consists of all resource nongenerating maps for which the dual map is also resource nongenerating). As an example, we apply our results to quantum thermodynamics with Gibbs preserving operations, and several other affine resource theories. Finally, we discuss the applications of these results to resource theories that are not affine and, along the way, provide the necessary and sufficient conditions that a quantum resource theory consists of a resource destroying map.