Robustness of asymmetry and coherence of quantum states

Marco Piani, Marco Cianciaruso, Thomas R. Bromley, Carmine Napoli, Nathaniel Johnston, Gerardo Adesso

Abstract

Quantum states may exhibit asymmetry with respect to the action of a given group. Such an asymmetry of states can be considered as a resource in applications such as quantum metrology, and it is a concept that encompasses quantum coherence as a special case. We introduce explicitly and study the robustness of asymmetry, a quantifier of asymmetry of states that we prove to have many attractive properties, including efficient numerical computability via semidefinite programming, and an operational interpretation in a channel discrimination context. We also introduce the notion of asymmetry witnesses, whose measurement in a laboratory detects the presence of asymmetry. We prove that properly constrained asymmetry witnesses provide lower bounds to the robustness of asymmetry, which is shown to be a directly measurable quantity itself. We then focus our attention on coherence witnesses and the robustness of coherence, for which we prove a number of additional results; these include an analysis of its specific relevance in phase discrimination and quantum metrology, an analytical calculation of its value for a relevant class of quantum states, and tight bounds that relate it to another previously defined coherence monotone.

Locations

• Physical review. A/Physical review, A - View
• arXiv (Cornell University) - View - PDF
• Strathprints: The University of Strathclyde institutional repository (University of Strathclyde) - View - PDF
• Repository@Nottingham (University of Nottingham) - View - PDF
• Nottingham ePrints (University of Nottingham) - View - PDF
• DataCite API - View