We show that the distillable coherence---which is equal to the relative entropy of coherence---is, up to a constant factor, always bounded by the ${\ensuremath{\ell}}_{1}$-norm measure of coherence (defined as the sum of absolute values of off diagonals). Thus the latter plays a similar role as logarithmic negativity plays in entanglement theory and this is the best operational interpretation from a resource-theoretic viewpoint. Consequently the two measures are intimately connected to another operational measure, the robustness of coherence. We find also relationships between these measures, which are tight for general states, and the tightest possible for pure and qubit states. For a given robustness, we construct a state having minimum distillable coherence.
Quantum coherence plays a central role in various research areas. The
l1-norm of coherence is one of the most important coherence measures that are easily computable, but it is not easy to find a simple interpretation. We show that the
l1-norm of coherence is uniquely characterized by a few simple axioms, which demonstrates in a precise sense that it is the analog of negativity in entanglement theory and sum negativity in the resource theory of magic-state quantum computation. We also provide an operational interpretation of the
l1-norm of coherence as the maximum entanglement, measured by the negativity, produced by incoherent operations acting on the system and an incoherent ancilla. To achieve this goal, we clarify the relation between the
l1-norm of coherence and negativity for all bipartite states, which leads to an interesting generalization of maximally correlated states. Surprisingly, all entangled states thus obtained are distillable. Moreover, their entanglement cost and distillable entanglement can be computed explicitly for a qubit-qudit system.