Resource theory of coherence based on positive-operator-valued measures

Abstract: Quantum coherence is a fundamental feature of quantum mechanics and an underlying requirement for most quantum information tasks. In the resource theory of coherence, incoherent states are diagonal with respect to a fixed orthonormal basis, i.e., they can be seen as arising from a von Neumann measurement. Here, we introduce and study a generalization to a resource theory of coherence defined with respect to the most general quantum measurement, i.e., to an arbitrary positive-operator-valued measure (POVM). We establish POVM-based coherence measures and POVM-incoherent operations which coincide for the case of von Neumann measurements with their counterparts in standard coherence theory. We provide a semidefinite program that allows to characterize interconversion properties of resource states, and exemplify our framework by means of the qubit trine POVM, for which we also show analytical results.