A note on cohering power and de-cohering power

Abstract: Cohering power and de-cohering power have recently been proposed to quantify the ability of a quantum operation to produce and erase coherence respectively. In this paper, we investigate the properties of cohering power and de-cohering power. First, we prove the equivalence between two different kinds of cohering power for any quantum operation on single qubit systems, which implies that l1 norm of coherence is monotone under Maximally incoherent operation (MIO) and Dephasing-covariant operation (DIO) in 2-dimensional space. In higher dimensions, however, we show that the monotonicity under MIO or DIO does not hold. Besides, we compare the set of quantum operations with zero cohering power with Maximally incoherent operation (MIO) and Incoherent operation (IO). Moreover, two different types of de-cohering power are defined and we find that they are not equal in single qubit systems. Finally, we make a comparison between cohering power and de-cohering power for single qubit unitary operations and show that cohering power is always larger than decohering power.