We have decided to discontinue the publication of preprints on our preprint server as of 1 March 2024. The publication culture within mathematics has changed so much due to the rise of repositories such as ArXiV (www.arxiv.org) that we are encouraging all institute members to make their preprints available there. An institute's repository in its previous form is, therefore, unnecessary. The preprints published to date will remain available here, but we will not add any new preprints here.
MiS Preprint
53/2019
Operational advantage of basis-independent quantum coherence
In the quantitative theory of quantum coherence, the amount of coherence is defined as the distance between the given state to to the closest incoherent state. The set of incoherent states is conventionally defined as any state with a diagonal density matrix. One of the objections to this formulation is that the incoherent states are intrinsically basis-dependent, which makes the amount of coherence also a basis-dependent quantity.
Basis-independent measures have been recently been proposed where the incoherent state is taken as the maximally mixed state. We show that this is the only possible choice of reference incoherent state, without modifying the original definition of coherence. We find a relation between the two formulations by defining a contribution to the coherence due to the basis choice. The hierarchical relationship between quantum coherence and the various quantum correlations is explored in detail. Finally, we illustrate some operational uses of the basis-independent quantum coherence in quantum information theory tasks.
