Exploring the Limits of Open Quantum Dynamics II: Gibbs-Preserving Maps from the Perspective of Majorization

Abstract: Motivated by reachability questions in coherently controlled open quantum systems coupled to a thermal bath, as well as recent progress in the field of thermo-/vector-majorization we generalize classical majorization from unital quantum channels to channels with an arbitrary fixed point $D$ of full rank. Such channels preserve some Gibbs-state and thus play an important role in the resource theory of quantum thermodynamics, in particular in thermo-majorization. Based on this we investigate $D$-majorization on matrices in terms of its topological and order properties, such as existence of unique maximal and minimal elements, etc. Moreover we characterize $D$-majorization in the qubit case via the trace norm and elaborate on why this is a challenging task when going beyond two dimensions.