The relative entropy measure quantifying coherence, a key property of quantum system, is proposed recently. In this note, we firstly investigate structural characterization of maximally coherent st...
The relative entropy measure quantifying coherence, a key property of quantum system, is proposed recently. In this note, we firstly investigate structural characterization of maximally coherent states with respect to the relative entropy measure. It is shown that mixed maximally coherent states do not exist and every pure maximally coherent state has the form U|ψihψ|U† , |ψi = √1 d Pd k=1 |ki, U is diagonal unitary. Based on the characterization of pure maximally coherent states, for a bipartite maximally coherent state with dA = dB, we obtain that the super-additivity equality of relative entropy measure holds if and only if the state is a product state of its reduced states. From the viewpoint of resource in quantum information, we find there exists a maximally coherent state with maximal entanglement. Originated from the behaviour of quantum correlation under the influence of quantum operations, we further classify the incoherent operations which send maximally coherent states to themselves.
In recent years, several measures have been proposed for characterizing the coherence of a given quantum state. We derive several results that illuminate how these measures behave when restricted to pure states. Notably, we present an explicit characterization of the closest incoherent state to a given pure state under the trace distance measure of coherence. We then use this result to show that the states maximizing the trace distance of coherence are exactly the maximally coherent states. We define the trace distance of entanglement and show that it coincides with the trace distance of coherence for pure states. Finally, we give an alternate proof to a recent result that the ${\ensuremath{\ell}}_{1}$ measure of coherence of a pure state is never smaller than its relative entropy of coherence.
The operational characterization of quantum coherence is the cornerstone in the development of the resource theory of coherence. We introduce a new coherence quantifier based on maximum relative entropy. We prove that the maximum relative entropy of coherence is directly related to the maximum overlap with maximally coherent states under a particular class of operations, which provides an operational interpretation of the maximum relative entropy of coherence. Moreover, we show that, for any coherent state, there are examples of subchannel discrimination problems such that this coherent state allows for a higher probability of successfully discriminating subchannels than that of all incoherent states. This advantage of coherent states in subchannel discrimination can be exactly characterized by the maximum relative entropy of coherence. By introducing a suitable smooth maximum relative entropy of coherence, we prove that the smooth maximum relative entropy of coherence provides a lower bound of one-shot coherence cost, and the maximum relative entropy of coherence is equivalent to the relative entropy of coherence in the asymptotic limit. Similar to the maximum relative entropy of coherence, the minimum relative entropy of coherence has also been investigated. We show that the minimum relative entropy of coherence provides an upper bound of one-shot coherence distillation, and in the asymptotic limit the minimum relative entropy of coherence is equivalent to the relative entropy of coherence.
Since quantum coherence is an undoubted characteristic trait of quantum physics, the quantification and application of quantum coherence has been one of the long-standing central topics in quantum information science. Within the framework of a resource theory of quantum coherence proposed recently, a fiducial basis should be preselected for characterizing the quantum coherence in specific circumstances, namely, the quantum coherence is a basis-dependent quantity. Therefore, a natural question is raised: what are the maximum and minimum coherences contained in a certain quantum state with respect to a generic basis? While the minimum case is trivial, it is not so intuitive to verify in which basis the quantum coherence is maximal. Based on the coherence measure of relative entropy, we indicate the particular basis in which the quantum coherence is maximal for a given state, where the Fourier matrix (or more generally, complex Hadamard matrices) plays a critical role in determining the basis. Intriguingly, though we can prove that the basis associated with the Fourier matrix is a stationary point for optimizing the l1 norm of coherence, numerical simulation shows that it is not a global optimal choice.
We investigate maximally coherent states to provide a refinement in quantifying coherence and give a measure-independent definition of the coherence-preserving operations. A maximally coherent state can be considered a resource to create arbitrary quantum states of the same dimension by merely incoherent operations. We propose that only maximally coherent states should achieve the maximal value for a coherence measure and use this condition as an additional criterion for coherence measures to obtain a refinement in quantifying coherence that excludes invalid and inefficient coherence measures. Under this criterion, we then give a measure-independent definition of the coherence-preserving operations, which play a role in quantifying coherence similar to that played by the local unitary operations in the scenario of studying entanglement.