One-shot coherence distillation

Abstract: We characterize the distillation of quantum coherence in the one-shot setting, that is, the conversion of general quantum states into maximally coherent states under different classes of quantum operations. We show that the maximally incoherent operations (MIO) and the dephasing-covariant incoherent operations (DIO) have the same power in the task of one-shot coherence distillation. We establish that the one-shot distillable coherence under MIO and DIO is efficiently computable with a semidefinite program, which we show to correspond to a quantum hypothesis testing problem. Further, we introduce a family of coherence monotones generalizing the robustness of coherence as well as the modified trace distance of coherence, and show that they admit an operational interpretation in characterizing the fidelity of distillation under different classes of operations. By providing an explicit formula for these quantities for pure states, we show that the one-shot distillable coherence under MIO, DIO, strictly incoherent operations (SIO), and incoherent operations (IO) is equal for all pure states.