How many ebits can be unlocked with one classical bit?

We find an upper bound on the rate at which entanglement can be unlocked by classical bits. In particular, we show that for quantum information sources that are specified by ensambles of pure bipartite states, one classical bit can unlock at most one ebit.Comment: 3 pages, Brief Report, Comments are Welcom

Reexamination of entanglement of superpositions

We find tight lower and upper bounds on the entanglement of a superposition of two bipartite states in terms of the entanglement of the two states constituting the superposition. Our upper bound is dramatically tighter than the one presented in Phys. Rev. Lett 97, 100502 (2006) and our lower bound can be used to provide lower bounds on different measures of entanglement such as the entanglement of formation and the entanglement of subspaces. We also find that in the case in which the two states are one-sided orthogonal, the entanglement of the superposition state can be expressed explicitly in terms of the entanglement of the two states in the superposition.Comment: 5 pages, Published versio

Are Incoherent Operations Physically Consistent? -- A Critical Examination of Incoherent Operations

Considerable work has recently been directed toward developing resource theories of quantum coherence. In most approaches, a state is said to possess quantum coherence if it is not diagonal in some specified basis. In this letter we establish a criterion of physical consistency for any resource theory in terms of physical implementation of the free operations, and we show that all currently proposed basis-dependent theories of coherence fail to satisfy this criterion. We further characterize the physically consistent resource theory of coherence and find its operational power to be quite limited. After relaxing the condition of physical consistency, we introduce the class of dephasing-covariant incoherent operations, present a number of new coherent monotones based on relative R\'{e}nyi entropies, and study incoherent state transformations under different operational classes. In particular, we derive necessary and sufficient conditions for qubit state transformations and show these conditions hold for all classes of incoherent operations

Alignment of reference frames and an operational interpretation for the G-asymmetry

We determine the quantum states and measurements that optimize the accessible information in a reference frame alignment protocol associated with the groups U(1), corresponding to a phase reference, and $\mathbb{Z}_M$, the cyclic group of $M$ elements. Our result provides an operational interpretation for the $G$-asymmetry which is information-theoretic and which was thus far lacking. In particular, we show that in the limit of many copies of the bounded-size quantum reference frame, the accessible information approaches the Holevo bound. This implies that the rate of alignment of reference frames, measured by the (linearized) accessible information per system, is equal to the regularized, linearized $G$-asymmetry. The latter quantity is equal to the number variance in the case where $G=U(1)$. Quite surprisingly, for the case where $G=\mathbb{Z}_{M}$ and $M\geq 4$, it is equal to a quantity that is not additive in general, but instead can be superadditive under tensor product of two distinct bounded-size reference frames. This remarkable phenomenon is purely quantum and has no classical analog.Comment: 12pages, no figures. Title has been changed to match teh published versio

Necessary and sufficient conditions for local manipulation of multipartite pure quantum states

Suppose several parties jointly possess a pure multipartite state, |\psi>. Using local operations on their respective systems and classical communication (i.e. LOCC) it may be possible for the parties to transform deterministically |\psi> into another joint state |\phi>. In the bipartite case, Nielsen majorization theorem gives the necessary and sufficient conditions for this process of entanglement transformation to be possible. In the multipartite case, such a deterministic local transformation is possible only if both the states in the same stochastic LOCC (SLOCC) class. Here we generalize Nielsen majorization theorem to the multipartite case, and find necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a local separable transformation between two multipartite states in the same SLOCC class. When such a deterministic conversion is not possible, we find an expression for the maximum probability to convert one state to another by local separable operations. In addition, we find necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a separable transformation that converts a multipartite pure state into one of a set of possible final states all in the same SLOCC class. Our results are expressed in terms of (1) the stabilizer group of the state representing the SLOCC orbit, and (2) the associate density matrices (ADMs) of the two multipartite states. The ADMs play a similar role to that of the reduced density matrices, when considering local transformations that involves pure bipartite states. We show in particular that the requirement that one ADM majorize another is a necessary condition but in general far from being also sufficient as it happens in the bipartite case.Comment: Published version. Abstract and introduction revised significantl