No Arabic abstract
We present an optimal probabilistic protocol to distill quantum coherence. Inspired by a specific entanglement distillation protocol, our main result yields a strictly incoherent operation that produces one of a family of maximally coherent states of variable dimension from any pure quantum state. We also expand this protocol to the case where it is possible, for some initial states, to avert any waste of resources as far as the output states are concerned, by exploiting an additional transformation into a suitable intermediate state. These results provide practical schemes for efficient quantum resource manipulation.
Quantum channels underlie the dynamics of quantum systems, but in many practical settings it is the channels themselves that require processing. We establish universal limitations on the processing of both quantum states and channels, expressed in the form of no-go theorems and quantitative bounds for the manipulation of general quantum channel resources under the most general transformation protocols. Focusing on the class of distillation tasks -- which can be understood either as the purification of noisy channels into unitary ones, or the extraction of state-based resources from channels -- we develop fundamental restrictions on the error incurred in such transformations and comprehensive lower bounds for the overhead of any distillation protocol. In the asymptotic setting, our results yield broadly applicable bounds for rates of distillation. We demonstrate our results through applications to fault-tolerant quantum computation, where we obtain state-of-the-art lower bounds for the overhead cost of magic state distillation, as well as to quantum communication, where we recover a number of strong converse bounds for quantum channel capacity.
Coherence distillation is a central topic of the resource theory of coherence and various coherence distillation protocols were proposed. In this paper, we investigate the optimal probabilistic coherence distillation protocol, whose aim is to transform a coherent state into a set of $n$-level maximally coherent states by using strictly incoherent operations. Specifically, we accomplish this protocol by presenting an analytical expression for the maximal average distillable coherence for a general state and constructing the corresponding operation achieving this bound. Our protocol is a universal protocol since it can be applied to any coherence measure.
The difficulty in manipulating quantum resources deterministically often necessitates the use of probabilistic protocols, but the characterization of their capabilities and limitations has been lacking. Here, we develop two general approaches to this problem. First, we introduce a new resource monotone based on the Hilbert projective metric and we show that it obeys a very strong type of monotonicity: it can rule out all transformations, probabilistic or deterministic, between states in any quantum resource theory. This allows us to place fundamental limitations on state transformations and restrict the advantages that probabilistic protocols can provide over deterministic ones, significantly strengthening previous findings and extending recent no-go theorems. We apply our results to obtain a substantial improvement in lower bounds for the errors and overheads of probabilistic distillation protocols, directly applicable to tasks such as entanglement or magic state distillation, and computable through convex optimization. In broad classes of resources, we show that no better restrictions on probabilistic protocols are possible -- our monotone can provide a necessary and sufficient condition for probabilistic resource transformations, thus allowing us to quantify exactly the highest fidelity achievable in resource distillation tasks by means of any probabilistic manipulation protocol. Complementing this approach, we introduce a general method for bounding achievable probabilities in resource transformations through a family of convex optimization problems. We show it to tightly characterize single-shot probabilistic distillation in broad types of resource theories, allowing an exact analysis of the trade-offs between the probabilities and errors in distilling maximally resourceful states.
Recently, various non-classical properties of quantum states and channels have been characterized through an advantage they provide in specific quantum information tasks over their classical counterparts. Such advantage can be typically proven to be quantitative, in that larger amounts of quantum resources lead to better performance in the corresponding tasks. So far, these characterizations have been established only in the finite-dimensional setting. In this manuscript, we present a technique for extending the known results to the infinite-dimensional regime. The technique relies on approximating infinite-dimensional resource measures by their finite-dimensional counterparts. We give a sufficient condition for the approximation procedure to be tight, i.e. to match with established infinite-dimensional resource quantifiers, and another sufficient condition for the procedure to match with relevant extensions of these quantifiers. We show that various continuous variable quantum resources fall under these conditions, hence, giving them an operational interpretation through the advantage they can provide in so-called quantum games. Finally, we extend the interpretation to the max relative entropy in the infinite-dimensional setting.
We introduce and study the task of assisted coherence distillation. This task arises naturally in bipartite systems where both parties work together to generate the maximal possible coherence on one of the subsystems. Only incoherent operations are allowed on the target system while general local quantum operations are permitted on the other, an operational paradigm that we call local quantum-incoherent operations and classical communication (LQICC). We show that the asymptotic rate of assisted coherence distillation for pure states is equal to the coherence of assistance, an analog of the entanglement of assistance, whose properties we characterize. Our findings imply a novel interpretation of the von Neumann entropy: it quantifies the maximum amount of extra quantum coherence a system can gain when receiving assistance from a collaborative party. Our results are generalized to coherence localization in a multipartite setting and possible applications are discussed.