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We investigate the limits on cooling and work extraction via Markovian thermal processes assisted by a finite-dimensional memory. Here the memory is a $d$-dimensional quantum system with trivial Hamiltonian and initially in a maximally mixed state. For cooling a qubit system, we consider two paradigms: cooling under coherent control and cooling under incoherent control. For both paradigms, we derive the optimal ground-state populations under the set of general thermal processes (TP) and the set of Markovian thermal processes (MTP), and we further propose memory-assisted protocols, which bridge the gap between the performances of TP and MTP. For the task of work extraction, we prove that when the target system is a qubit in the excited state the minimum extraction error achieved by TP can be approximated by Markovian thermal processes assisted by a large enough memory. Our results can bridge the performances of TP and MTP in thermodynamic tasks including cooling and work extraction., Comment: Published version

We present a resource theory to investigate the power of a multqubit system as a probe in the task of dephasing estimation. Our approach employs the quantum Fisher information about the dephasing parameter as the resource measure. Based on the monotonicity of quantum Fisher information, we propose two sets of free operations in our resource theory, the Hamming distance preserving operations and the selectively Hamming distance preserving operations. We derive a necessary condition for the state transformation under these free operations and demonstrate that uniform superposition states are the golden states in our resource theory. We further compare our resource theory with the resource theory of coherence and thoroughly investigate the relation between their free operations in both single-qubit and multiqubit cases. Additionally, for multiqubit systems, we discover the incompatibility between the resource theory of dephasing estimation and that of $U(1)$ asymmetry, which is responsible for phase estimation. The condition for enhancing the performance of a probe state in phase estimation while preserving its ability in dephasing estimation is also discussed. Our results provide new insights into quantum parameter estimation by the resource-theoretic approach., Comment: Published version

The gap between thermal operations (TO) and enhanced thermal operations (EnTO) is an open problem raised in [Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 210403 (2015)]. It originates from the limitations on coherence evolutions. Here we solve this problem by analytically proving that, a state transition induced by EnTO cannot be approximately realized by TO. It confirms that TO and EnTO lead to different laws of state conversions. Our results can also contribute to the study of the restrictions on coherence dynamics in quantum thermodynamics., Comment: Almost rewitten. In this version, we disprove the closure conjecture

We investigate the basic constraint on amplifying the asymmetry in quantum states with correlated catalysts. Here a correlated catalyst is a finite-dimensional auxiliary, which exactly preserves its reduced state while allowed to become correlated to the quantum system. Interestingly, we prove that under translationally invariant operations, catalysts in pure states are useless in any state transformation, while with a correlated catalyst in a mixed state, one can enlarge the set of accessible states from an initially asymmetric state. Moreover, we show that the power of a catalyst increases with its dimension, and further, with a large enough catalyst, a qubit state with arbitrarily small amount of asymmetry can be converted to any mixed qubit state. In doing so, we build a bridge between two important results concerning the restrictions on coherence conversion, the no-broadcasting theorem and the catalytic coherence. Our results may also apply to the constraints on coherence evolution in quantum thermodynamics, and to the distribution of timing information between quantum clocks., Comment: Almost published version

Masking information is a protocol that encodes quantum information into a bipartite entangled state while the information is completely unknown to local systems. This paper explicitly studies the structure of the set of maskable states and its relation to hyperdisks. We prove that although the qubit states which can be masked must locate on a single hyperdisk, the set of maskable states can consist of two or more hyperdisks for high-dimensional cases. Our results may shed light on several research fields of quantum information theory, such as the structure of entangled states and the local discrimination of bipartite states., Comment: 7+4 Pages, 1 Figure, Published version

We define the coherence non-activating measurement as the positive operator-valued measurement which gives the same result whether or not the coherence in a quantum state is destroyed. A connection is built between the coherence activating ability of a measurement and its ability to steer quantum states when coherence non-activating measurement is free. Then we study the quantum discord based on coherence non-activating measurement and its behavior under local incoherent operations. Our results contribute to the study of resource non-activating condition, which is a complementary to the well-studied resource non-generating condition., Comment: 6 pages, no figures. Comments are welcome

We study the limitations on coherence evolutions under the constraints of thermodynamic laws, and focus on the optimal thermal operations (TO) reaching the bounds. For qubit case, we find a thermal operation involving only a single-mode reservoir (STO) which maintains the maximum coherence allowed by general TO. For higher dimensions, we derive general bounds on coherence merging under TO, and find STO to reach the bounds. By applying the bound to a two-qubit system, we prove that erasing correlations while preserving the marginal states is not free in the resource theory of thermodynamics. Due to the simple structure of STO and its strong ability in coherence processing, our results shed light on both theoretical and experimental studies in the field of thermodynamics for small quantum systems., Comment: 7 pages. Comments are welcome!

We define the stringent coherence witness as an observable which has zero mean value for all of incoherent states and hence a nonzero mean value indicates the coherence. The existence of such witnesses are proved for any finite-dimension states. Not only is the witness efficient in testing whether the state is coherent, the mean value is also quantitatively related to the amount of coherence contained in the state. For an unknown state, the modulus of the mean value of a normalized witness provides a tight lower bound of $l_1$-norm of coherence in the state. When we have some previous knowledge of the state, the optimal witness is derived such that its measured mean value, called the witnessed coherence, equals to the $l_1$-norm of coherence. One can also fix the witness and implement some incoherent operations on the state before the witness is measured. In this case, the measured mean value cannot reach the witnessed coherence if the initial state and the fixed witness does not match well. Based this result, we design a quantum coherence game. Our results provides a way to directly measure the coherence in arbitrary finite dimension states and an operational interpretation of the $l_1$-norm of coherence., Comment: 5 pages, 1 figure. Comments are welcome!

Quantum coherence and quantum correlations are of fundamental and practical significance for the development of quantum mechanics.They are also cornerstones of quantum computation and quantum communication theory. Searching physically meaningful and mathematically rigorous quantifiers of them are long-standing concerns of the community of quantum information science, and various faithful measures have been introduced so far. We review in this paper the measures of discordlike quantum correlations for bipartite and multipartite systems, the measures of quantum coherence for any single quantum system, and their relationship in different settings. Our aim is to provide a full review about the resource theory of quantum coherence, including its application in many-body systems, and the discordlike quantum correlations which were defined based on the various distance measures of states. We discuss the interrelations between quantum coherence and quantum correlations established in an operational way, and the fundamental characteristics of quantum coherence such as their complementarity under different basis sets, their duality with path information of an interference experiment, their distillation and dilution under different operations, and some new viewpoints of the superiority of the quantum algorithms from the perspective of quantum coherence. Additionally, we review properties of geometric quantum correlations and quantum coherence under noisy quantum channels. Finally, the main progresses for the study of quantum correlations and quantum coherence in the relativistic settings are reviewed. All these results provide an overview for the conceptual implications and basic connections of quantum coherence, quantum correlations, and their potential applications in various related subjects of physics., Comment: 82 pages, 8 figures; Final version to be published in Physics Reports

Motivated by Buscemi's semi-quantum nonlocal game [PRL 108, 200401(2012)], We propose an entanglement witness game, a quantum game based on entanglement witness. Similar as the semi-quantum nonlocal game, the existence of entanglement shared by the players is necessary and sufficient for obtaining a positive average payoff in our entanglement witness game. Two explicit examples are constructed to demonstrate how to play our entanglement witness game and its relations with the CHSH nonlocal game., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures

Resource theory is a widely-applicable framework for analyzing the physical resources required for given tasks, such as computation, communication, and energy extraction. In this paper, we propose a general scheme for analyzing resource theories based on resource destroying maps, which leave resource-free states unchanged but erase the resource stored in all other states. We introduce a group of general conditions that determine whether a quantum operation exhibits typical resource-free properties in relation to a given resource destroying map. Our theory reveals fundamental connections among basic elements of resource theories, in particular, free states, free operations, and resource measures. In particular, we define a class of simple resource measures that can be calculated without optimization, and that are monotone nonincreasing under operations that commute with the resource destroying map. We apply our theory to the resources of coherence and quantum correlations (e.g., discord), two prominent features of nonclassicality., Comment: 12 pages including Supplemental Material, published version

We define the coherence non-generating channel as the completely positive trace-preserving map which does not generate quantum coherence from an incoherent state. The incoherent operations are the strict subset of the coherence non-generating channels. We prove that the relative entropy of coherence is monotonically decreasing under the coherence non-generating channels, while the coherence of formation may increase under such channels. Interestingly, by combining mathematically the coherence of formation to the entanglement of formation, we show that the coherence of formation of a single-qubit is never increased by a coherence non-generating channel. This leads to the superadditivity property for the coherence increasing power of quantum channels, namely, while two channels can not increase coherence individually, they may increase the quantum coherence of a composed system. Further, we derive the general form of the rank-2 coherence non-generating qubit channels. Our results contribute to the resource theory of quantum coherence., Comment: almost published version

As the precious resource for quantum information processing, quantum coherence can be created remotely if the involved two sites are quantum correlated. It can be expected that the amount of coherence created should depend on the quantity of the shared quantum correlation, which is also a resource. Here, we establish an operational connection between coherence induced by steering and the quantum correlation. We find that the steering-induced coherence quantified by such as relative entropy of coherence and trace-norm of coherence is bounded from above by a known quantum correlation measure defined as the one-side measurement-induced disturbance. The condition that the upper bound saturated by the induced coherence varies for different measures of coherence. The tripartite scenario is also studied and similar conclusion can be obtained. Our results provide the operational connections between local and non-local resources in quantum information processing., Comment: almost published version

Lying at the heart of quantum mechanics, coherence has recently been studied as a key resource in quantum information theory. Quantum steering, a fundamental notion originally considered by Schr{\"o}dinger, has also recently received much attention. When Alice and Bob share a correlated quantum system, Alice can perform a local measurement to `steer' Bob's reduced state. We introduce the maximal steered coherence as a measure describing the extent to which steering can remotely create coherence; more precisely, we find the maximal coherence of Bob's steered state in the eigenbasis of his original reduced state, where maximization is performed over all positive-operator valued measurements for Alice. We prove that maximal steered coherence vanishes for quantum-classical states whilst reaching a maximum for pure entangled states with full Schmidt rank. Although invariant under local unitary operations, maximal steered coherence may be increased when Bob performs a channel. For a two-qubit state we find that Bob's channel can increase maximal steered coherence if and only if it is neither unital nor semi-classical, which coincides with the condition for increasing discord. Our results show that the power of steering for coherence generation, though related to discord, is distinct from existing measures of quantum correlation., Comment: Published version

The effect of a local trace-preserving single-qubit channel on a two-qubit state is investigated in the picture of the quantum steering ellipsoids (QSE). The phenomenon of locally increased quantum correlation is visualized in this picture. We strictly prove that a $B$-side two-qubit discordant state can be locally prepared from a classical state by a trace-preserving channel on qubit $B$ if and only if its QSE of $B$ is a non-radial line segment. For states with higer-dimensional QSEs, the phenomenon of locally increased quantum correlation generally happens when the shape of the QSE is like a baguette. Based on this observation, we find a class of entangled states whose quantum discord can be increased by the local amplitude damping channel. Further, We find that the local quantum channel does not increase the size of QSEs of either qubit $A$ or qubit $B$, for the needle-shape QSE states, as well as the Bell diagonal states with higher-dimensional QSE., Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures. Comments are welcome

We prove that, when two local quantum channels are used paralleled, the quantum-correlating power (QCP) of the composed channel is no less than the sum of QCP of the two channels. For local channels with zero QCP, the super-activation of QCP is a fairly common effect, and proved to exist except for the trivial case where both of the channels are completely decohering channels or unitary operators. For general quantum channels, we show that the (not-so-common) additivity of QCP can be observed for the situation where a measuring-and-preparing channel is used together with a completely decohering channel., Comment: published version

We define genuine total, classical and quantum correlations in tripartite systems. The measure we propose is based on the idea that genuine tripartite correlation exists if and only if the correlation between any bipartition does not vanish. We find in a symmetrical tripartite state, for total correlation and classical correlation, the genuine tripartite correlations are no less than pair-wise correlations. However, the genuine quantum tripartite correlation can be surpassed by the pair-wise quantum correlations. Analytical expressions for genuine tripartite correlations are obtained for pure states and rank-2 symmetrical states. The genuine correlations in both entangled and separable states are calculated., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures

Quantum correlation can be created by local operations from a classically correlated state. We define quantum-correlating power (QCP) of a local quantum channel as the maximum amount of quantum correlation that can be created by the channel. The quantum correlation that we discuss in this article is defined on the left part of the bipartite state. We prove that for any local channel, the optimal input state, which corresponds to the maximum quantum correlation in the output state, must be a classical-classical state. Further, the single-qubit channels with maximum QCP can be found in the class of rank-1 channels which take their optimal input states to rank-2 quantum-classical states. The analytic expression for QCP of single-qubit amplitude damping channel is obtained. Super-activation property of QCP, i.e., two zero-QCP channels can consist a positive-QCP channel, is discussed for single-qubit phase damping channels., Comment: 5pages, 2 figures. Comments are welcome

Quantum correlation can be created by a local operation from some initially classical states. We prove that the necessary and sufficient condition for a local trace-preserving channel to create quantum correlation is that it is not a commutativity-preserving channel. This condition is valid for arbitrary finite dimension systems. We also derive the explicit form of commutativity-preserving channels. For a qubit, a commutativity-preserving channel is either a completely decohering channel or a mixing channel. For a three-dimensional system (qutrit), a commutativity-preserving channel is either a completely decohering channel or an isotropic channel., Comment: Theorem 2 has been modified

We prove the condition for local trace-preserving channels to create quantum correlation from initially classical states. For two-qubit states, the necessary and sufficient condition for a channel that cannot create quantum correlation in any initially classical state is that it is either a completely decohering channel or a mixing channel. For states in higher dimensions, we show that even a mixing channel can create quantum correlation from a classically correlated state. Our results reveal that mixedness is important for creation of quantum correlation in high-dimension quantum systems., Comment: 4 pages, no figures