We introduce the witness robustness of quantum measurements, a resource quantifier whose admissible noise consists of tuples of free-state witnesses rather than physical measurements. We establish its operational interpretation: it quantifies the maximal advantage that a measurement can provide over free measurements in discriminating an ensemble composed entirely of free states. Unlike the standard and generalized robustnesses, the witness robustness is not faithful in general, reflecting the fact that a resourceful measurement need not be useful when only free states can be prepared. We identify conditions under which faithfulness is recovered and show that, in resource theories admitting a resource-destroying map, the witness robustness vanishes for every measurement. We also establish fundamental properties, including convexity and monotonicity. Finally, we derive analytical results for projective measurements in single-qubit magic and for binary pure-state projective measurements in the two-qubit PPT entanglement theory.
We introduce the witness robustness of quantum measurements, a resource quantifier whose admissible noise consists of tuples of free-state witnesses rather than physical measurements. We establish its operational interpretation: it quantifies the maximal advantage that a measurement can provide over free measurements in discriminating an ensemble composed entirely of free states. Unlike the standard and generalized robustnesses, the witness robustness is not faithful in general, reflecting the fact that a resourceful measurement need not be useful when only free states can be prepared. We identify conditions under which faithfulness is recovered and show that, in resource theories admitting a resource-destroying map, the witness robustness vanishes for every measurement. We also establish fundamental properties, including convexity and monotonicity. Finally, we derive analytical results for projective measurements in single-qubit magic and for binary pure-state projective measurements in the two-qubit PPT entanglement theory.
Abstract Recently, the projective robustness of quantum states was introduced in (Regula 2022 Phys. Rev. Lett. 128 110505). This demonstrates that the projective robustness is a useful resource monotone and can comprehensively characterize the capabilities and limitations of probabilistic protocols that manipulate quantum resources deterministically. In this paper, we will extend the projective robustness to any convex resource theory of quantum channels and measurements. First, we introduce the projective robustness of quantum channels and prove that it satisfies some good properties, especially sub-multiplicativity under any free quantum process. Moreover, we show that the projective robustness of channels quantifies the maximal advantage that a given channel outperforms all free channels in the simultaneous discrimination and exclusion of a fixed-state ensemble. Second, we define the projective robustness of quantum measurements and prove that it exactly quantifies the maximal advantage that a given measurement outperforms all free measurements in the simultaneous discrimination and exclusion of two fixed-state ensembles. Finally, within a specific channel resource setting based on measurement incompatibility, we show that the projective robustness of quantum channels coincides with the projective robustness of measurement incompatibility.
Quantum resource theories (QRTs) provide a unified framework to analyze quantum properties as resources for achieving advantages in quantum information processing. The generalized robustness and the weight of resource have been gaining increasing attention as useful resource quantifiers. However, the existing analyses of these measures were restricted to the cases where convexity of the set of free states is assumed, and physically motivated resources do not necessarily satisfy this restriction. In this paper, we give characterizations of robustness- and weight-based measures in general QRTs without convexity restriction through two different yet related approaches. On the one hand, we characterize the generalized robustness and the weight of resource by introducing a nonlinear witness. We show a general construction of new witness observables that detect the resourcefulness of a given state from multiple copies of the state and, using these witnesses, we provide operational interpretations of the above resource measures even without any convexity assumption. On the other hand, we find that the generalized robustness and the weight of resource can also be interpreted as the worst-case maximum advantage in variants of channel-discrimination and channel-exclusion tasks, respectively, where the set of free states consists of several convex subsets corresponding to multiple restrictions. We further extend these results to QRTs for quantum channels and quantum instruments. These characterizations show that every quantum resource exhibits an advantage for the corresponding tasks, even in general QRTs without convexity assumption. Thus, we establish the usefulness of robustness-based and weight-based techniques beyond the conventional scope of convex QRTs, leading to a better understanding of the general structure of QRTs.
For any resource theory it is essential to identify tasks for which resource objects offer advantage over free objects. We show that this identification can always be accomplished for resource theories of quantum measurements in which free objects form a convex subset of measurements on a given Hilbert space. To this aim we prove that every resourceful measurement offers advantage for some quantum state discrimination task. Moreover, we give an operational interpretation of robustness, which quantifies the minimal amount of noise that must be added to a measurement to make it free. Specifically, we show that this geometric quantity is related to the maximal relative advantage that a resourceful measurement offers in a class of minimal-error state discrimination (MESD) problems. Finally, we apply our results to two classes of free measurements: incoherent measurements (measurements that are diagonal in the fixed basis) and separable measurements (measurements whose effects are separable operators). For both of these scenarios we find, in the asymptotic setting in which the dimension or the number of particles increase to infinity, the maximal relative advantage that resourceful measurements offer for state discrimination tasks.
A prevailing intuition holds that quantum protocols using only free states confer no operational advantage. This intuition is contradicted by free-state discrimination gaps in which restricted measurements fail to optimally distinguish even orthogonal free states. Known instances include nonlocality without entanglement and, more recently, nonstabilizerness without magic. We trace these examples to a single convex-geometric mechanism: whenever the set of free measurements is closed, convex, and strict subset the set of all measurements, and the free states is a convex set with an interior, a gap-witnessing ensemble can be drawn entirely from the free states. The resulting gap is operationally rigid: no finite-dimensional assistance -- catalyst or quantum memory -- can asymptotically improve the discrimination rate beyond the single-shot restricted limit. By contrast, non-free ensembles admit memory-assisted attacks that fully erase the gap, exposing a sharp operational asymmetry between free and resource-carrying ensembles.
Identifying what quantum-mechanical properties are useful to untap a superior performance in quantum technologies is a pivotal question. Quantum resource theories provide a unified framework to analyze and understand such properties, as successfully demonstrated for entanglement and coherence. While these are examples of convex resources, for which quantum advantages can always be identified, many physical resources are described by a nonconvex set of free states and their interpretation has so far remained elusive. Here we address the fundamental question of the usefulness of quantum resources without convexity assumption, by providing two operational interpretations of the generalized robustness measure in general resource theories. First, we characterize the generalized robustness in terms of a nonlinear resource witness and reveal that any state is more advantageous than a free one in some multicopy channel discrimination task. Next, we consider a scenario where a theory is characterized by multiple constraints and show that the generalized robustness coincides with the worst-case advantage in a single-copy channel discrimination setting. Based on these characterizations, we conclude that every quantum resource state shows a qualitative and quantitative advantage in discrimination problems in a general resource theory even without any specification on the structure of the free states.
Abstract We introduce a framework unifying the mathematical characterisation of different measures of general quantum resources and allowing for a systematic way to define a variety of faithful quantifiers for any given convex quantum resource theory. The approach allows us to describe many commonly used measures such as matrix norm-based quantifiers, robustness measures, convex roof-based measures, and witness-based quantifiers together in a common formalism based on the convex geometry of the underlying sets of resource-free states. We establish easily verifiable criteria for a measure to possess desirable properties such as faithfulness and strong monotonicity under relevant free operations, and show that many quantifiers obtained in this framework indeed satisfy them for any considered quantum resource. We derive various bounds and relations between the measures, generalising and providing significantly simplified proofs of results found in the resource theories of quantum entanglement and coherence. We also prove that the quantification of resources in this framework simplifies for pure states, allowing us to obtain more easily computable forms of the considered measures, and show that many of them are in fact equal on pure states. Further, we investigate the dual formulation of resource quantifiers, which provide a characterisation of the sets of resource witnesses. We present an explicit application of the results to the resource theories of multi-level coherence, entanglement of Schmidt number k , multipartite entanglement, as well as magic states, providing insight into the quantification of the four resources by establishing novel quantitative relations and introducing new quantifiers, such as a measure of entanglement of Schmidt number k which generalises the convex roof–extended negativity, a measure of k -coherence which generalises the ℓ 1 norm of coherence, and a hierarchy of norm-based quantifiers of k -partite entanglement generalising the greatest cross norm.