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Chinese Physics B

Thermal-Operation Conversion Limits for Few-Qubit Athermality Concentration

Song Gao, Xueyuan Hu

Published Mar 25, 2026• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract Manipulating thermodynamic resources at the finite-qubit level is a key challenge in quantum thermodynamics. While asymptotic transformations are governed by the relative entropy of athermality, the finite-qubit regime remains unexplored. We systematically investigate the concentration of athermality via thermal operations in the finite-qubit regime. Focusing strictly on diagonal qubit states, where the system’s non-equilibrium character is purely classical, we first establish a necessary and sufficient condition for realizing concentration in the two-qubit scenario, using quantum relative entropy as the resource measure. Leveraging this result, we propose a cascading protocol that achieves the upper bound of athermality amplification at a given temperature. Moreover, we generalize our analysis to Rényi relative entropies to examine how the concentration task depends on the specific measure of athermality. For the three-qubit scenario, we show that concentration can be achieved universally and is independent of the choice of the athermality measures. These results chart the finite-qubit landscape and reveal a sharp dichotomy between two-qubit and three-qubit thermodynamics.

DOI
10.1088/1674-1056/ae56e4

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Quantum advantage arises from quantum states that cannot be efficiently simulated on a classical computer. Such states are characterised by a property known as nonstabiliserness. In this work, we investigate whether nonstabiliserness can be generated by placing an initially stabiliser state in contact with a heat bath. Under minimal thermodynamic assumptions, we derive a necessary and sufficient condition for when this is possible. This yields an analytic characterisation of all nonstabiliser qubit states reachable through such thermal processes, together with explicit bounds on their nonstabiliserness. This, in turn, allows us to identify optimal regimes for generating this resource, including the Hamiltonians that maximise nonstabiliserness and the critical temperatures at which it emerges. Beyond the qubit case, we establish a general trade-off between the nonstabiliserness attainable under thermal operations and the initial nonequilibrium free energy of the system.
Non-Markovianity and athermality are useful resources in quantum technologies, and it is therefore important to understand the relations between the two, for general quantum dynamics. We propose three measures of non-Markovianity, first within the ambit of thermal operations, and then beyond it, that result from unavoidable perturbations in system's Hamiltonian and that leads to violations of conservation of total energy characterizing any thermal operation. The proposed measures are based respectively on system-environment entanglement, total correlation in the system-environment partition, and on a concept of distance defined on the sets of usual and approximate thermal operations. We investigate the response of non-Markovianity to the athermality-inducing perturbations, using all the three measures. For the entanglement and distance-based measures, we derive upper bounds on the response by a quantity that depends on the perturbative Hamiltonian. For the total correlation-based measure, we are able to compute the exact response. We present examples of qubit-qubit and qubit-qutrit systems for which perturbation leads to enhancement of non-Markovianity, as quantified by the entanglement and total correlation-based measures.
We introduce the resource-theoretic free energy of a quantum channel as the maximal work extractable from the channel as its output equilibrates to a thermal state and its reference system remains locally intact. It is proportional to the relative entropy between the given channel and the absolutely thermal channel. It attains a clear operational meaning as twice the asymptotic rates of athermality distillation and formation under Gibbs-preserving superchannels, which map one absolutely thermal channel to another for a given bath, thereby revealing the asymptotic reversibility of the resource theory of athermality for quantum channels. Consequently, we establish that the optimal extractable work in converting one channel to another through the asymptotic athermality distillation and formation tasks equals the difference in their free energies. We call this optimal work the thermodynamic work capacity of channel conversion. Quantum information processing and computing fundamentally concern the manipulation and transformation of quantum channels, which encompass quantum states, their transformations, and measurements. A quantitative characterization of the optimal thermodynamic work gain or expenditure in quantum information processing constitutes a key step toward formulating thermodynamics of quantum processes.
We investigate the thermodynamic constraints on the pivotal task of entanglement generation using out-of-equilibrium states through a model-independent framework with minimal assumptions. We establish a necessary and sufficient condition for a thermal process to generate bipartite qubit entanglement, starting from an initially separable state. Consequently, we identify the set of system states that cannot be entangled, when no external work is invested. In the regime of infinite temperature, we analytically construct this set; while for finite temperature, we provide a simple criterion to verify whether any given initial state is or is not entangleable. Furthermore, we provide an explicit construction of the future thermal cone of entanglement—the set of entangled states that a given separable state can thermodynamically evolve to. We offer a detailed discussion on the properties of this cone, focusing on the interplay between entanglement and its volumetric properties. We conclude with several key remarks on the generation of entanglement beyond two-qubit systems, and discuss its dynamics in the presence of dissipation. Published by the American Physical Society 2024