Operational Resource Theory of Quantum Channels

Abstract: Quantum resource theories have been widely studied to systematically characterize the non-classicality of quantum systems. Most resource theories focus on quantum states and study their interconversions. Although quantum channels are generally used as the tool for state manipulation, such a manipulation capability can be naturally regarded as a generalized quantum resource, leading to an open research direction in the resource theories of quantum channels. Various resource-theoretic properties of channels have been investigated, however, without treating channels themselves as operational resources that can also be manipulated and converted. In this Letter, we address this problem by first proposing a general resource framework for quantum channels and introducing resource monotones based on general distance quantifiers of channels. We study the interplay between channel and state resource theories by relating resource monotones of a quantum channel to its manipulation power of the state resource. Regarding channels as operational resources, we introduce asymptotic channel distillation and dilution, the most important tasks in an operational resource theory, and show how to bound the conversion rates with channel resource monotones. Finally, we apply our results to quantum coherence as an example and introduce the coherence of channels, which characterizes the coherence generation ability of channels. We consider asymptotic channel distillation and dilution with maximally incoherent operations and find the theory asymptotically irreversible, in contrast to the asymptotic reversibility of the coherence of states.