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arXiv:2512.04255 · Physical Review A

Unspeakable Coherence Concentration

Benjamin Stratton, Chung-Yun Hsieh, Paul Skrzypczyk

quant-phSubmitted Dec 3, 2025• Announced Dec 5, 2025• 0 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Unspeakable coherence is a key feature separating quantum and classical physics. Modelled as asymmetry with respect to a continuous transformation generated by a physically relevant observable, such as the Hamiltonian or angular moment, unspeakable coherence has been shown to be the relevant notion of coherence for achieving quantum advantage in the tasks of metrology, reference frame alignment and work extraction, among others. A question of both practical and foundational value is: Given some copies of a state with low coherence, can we prepare a more coherent state via coherence non-increasing operations? Here, we study this question in the minimal limiting case: Given two uncorrelated copies of a coherent state, can one, via globally coherence non-increasing unitaries, increase the coherence in a subsystem? We fully solve this problem for qubits, identifying the optimal unitaries and revealing the existence of bound coherence. This is then used to create a completely constructive multi-qubit coherence enhancement protocol, where only effective-qubit unitaries are used. Unexpectedly, in this protocol, we show that there exists states for which the ratio of the input-output coherence can be amplified unboundedly. Extending beyond qubits, we derive two fundamental upper bounds on the amount of local coherence that can be increased and prove a no-go theorem showing that certain global correlations cannot be converted to local coherence.

DOI
10.1103/fj8w-v1bb
Comments
7 + 14, 2 + 1

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Unspeakable coherence is a key feature separating quantum and classical physics. Modelled as asymmetry with respect to a continuous transformation generated by a physically relevant observable, such as the Hamiltonian or angular moment, unspeakable coherence has been shown to be the relevant notion of coherence for achieving quantum advantage in the tasks of metrology, reference frame alignment and work extraction, among others. A question of both practical and foundational value is: Given some copies of a state with low coherence, can we prepare a more coherent state via coherence non-increasing operations? Here, we study this question in the minimal limiting case: Given two uncorrelated copies of a coherent state, can one, via globally coherence non-increasing unitaries, increase the coherence in a subsystem? We fully solve this problem for qubits, identifying the optimal unitaries and revealing the existence of bound coherence. This is then used to create a completely constructive multi-qubit coherence enhancement protocol, where only effective-qubit unitaries are used. Unexpectedly, in this protocol, we show that there exists states for which the ratio of the input-output coherence can be amplified unboundedly. Extending beyond qubits, we derive two fundamental upper bounds on the amount of local coherence that can be increased and prove a no-go theorem showing that certain global correlations cannot be converted to local coherence.
Quantum coherence is a critical resource for many operational tasks. Understanding how to quantify and manipulate it also promises to have applications for a diverse set of problems in theoretical physics. For certain applications, however, one requires coherence between the eigenspaces of specific physical observables, such as energy, angular momentum, or photon number, and it makes a difference which eigenspaces appear in the superposition. For others, there is a preferred set of subspaces relative to which coherence is deemed a resource, but it is irrelevant which of the subspaces appear in the superposition. We term these two types of coherence unspeakable and speakable, respectively. We argue that a useful approach to quantifying and characterizing unspeakable coherence is provided by the resource theory of asymmetry when the symmetry group is a group of translations, and we translate a number of prior results on asymmetry into the language of coherence. We also highlight some of the applications of this approach, for instance, in the context of quantum metrology, quantum speed limits, quantum thermodynamics, and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). The question of how best to treat speakable coherence as a resource is also considered. We review a popular approach in terms of operations that preserve the set of incoherent states, propose an alternative approach in terms of operations that are covariant under dephasing, and we outline the challenge of providing a physical justification for either approach. Finally, we note some mathematical connections that hold among the different approaches to quantifying coherence.
Quantum coherence is one of the fundamental aspects distinguishing classical and quantum theories. Coherence between different energy eigenstates is particularly important, as it serves as a valuable resource under the law of energy conservation. A fundamental question in this setting is how well one can prepare good coherent states from low coherent states and whether a given coherent state is convertible to another one. Here, we show that any low coherent state is convertible to any high coherent state arbitrarily well in two operational settings: asymptotic and catalytic transformations. For a variant of asymptotic coherence manipulation where one aims to prepare desired states in local subsystems, the rate of transformation becomes unbounded regardless of how weak the initial coherence is. In a non-asymptotic transformation with a catalyst, a helper state that locally remains in the original form after the transformation, we show that an arbitrary state can be obtained from any low coherent state. Applying this to the standard asymptotic setting, we find that a catalyst can increase the coherence distillation rate significantly-from zero to infinite rate. We also prove that such anomalous transformation requires small but nonzero coherence in relevant modes, establishing the condition under which a sharp transition of the operational capability occurs. Our results provide a general characterization of the coherence transformability in these operational settings and showcase their peculiar properties compared to other common resource theories such as entanglement and quantum thermodynamics.
We investigate the fundamental constraint on amplifying the asymmetry in quantum states with correlating catalysts. Here a correlating catalyst is a finite-dimensional auxiliary, which exactly preserves its reduced state while allowed to become correlated with the quantum system. Interestingly, we prove that under translationally invariant operations, uncorrelating catalysts in pure states are useless in any state transformation, while with a correlating catalyst, one can extend the set of accessible states from an initially asymmetric state. Moreover, we show that the power of a catalyst increases with its dimension, and further, with a large enough catalyst, a qubit state with an arbitrarily small amount of asymmetry can be converted to any mixed qubit state. In doing so, we build a bridge between two important results concerning the restrictions on coherence conversion, the no-broadcasting theorem and the catalytic coherence. Our results may also apply to the constraints on coherence evolution in quantum thermodynamics and to the distribution of timing information between quantum clocks.
Abstract We introduce a notion of genuine correlated coherence. Such a notion is based on the possibility of concentrating on individual systems the coherence present in a distributed system, by making use of incoherent unitary transformations. We define an entropic quantifier of genuine correlated multipartite coherence for generic mixed states, and we focus on the bipartite pure-state case. In the latter case we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for the possibility of fully localizing the coherence, hence identifying the conditions for genuine correlated bipartite coherence. We analyze in detail the quantitative problem for the case of two-qubit pure states, identifying the states with the largest amount of genuine correlated coherence. Interestingly, such states do not have maximal global coherence nor maximal coherence rank.
We investigate assisted enhancement of quantum coherence in a bipartite setting with control and target systems, which converts the coherence of the control qubit into the enhanced coherence of the target qubit. We assume that only incoherent operations and measurements can be applied locally and classical information can be exchanged. In addition, the two subsystems are also coupled by a fixed Hamiltonian whose interaction strength can be controlled. This coupling does not generate any local coherence from incoherent input states. We show that in this setting a measurement and feed-forward based protocol can deterministically enhance the coherence of the target system while fully preserving its purity. The protocol can be iterated and several copies of the control state can be consumed to drive the target system arbitrarily close to a maximally coherent state. We experimentally demonstrate this protocol with a photonic setup and observe the enhancement of coherence for up to five iterations of the protocol.
We consider physical situations where the resource theories of coherence and thermodynamics play competing roles. In particular, we study the creation of quantum coherence using unitary operations with limited thermodynamic resources. We find the maximal coherence that can be created under unitary operations starting from a thermal state and find explicitly the unitary transformation that creates the maximal coherence. Since coherence is created by unitary operations starting from a thermal state, it requires some amount of energy. This motivates us to explore the trade-off between the amount of coherence that can be created and the energy cost of the unitary process. We also find the maximal achievable coherence under the constraint on the available energy. Additionally, we compare the maximal coherence and the maximal total correlation that can be created under unitary transformations with the same available energy at our disposal. We find that when maximal coherence is created with limited energy, the total correlation created in the process is upper bounded by the maximal coherence, and vice versa. For two-qubit systems we show that no unitary transformation exists that creates the maximal coherence and maximal total correlation simultaneously with a limited energy cost.