Gibbs-preserving operations requiring infinite amount of quantum coherence

Abstract: Gibbs-preserving operations have been studied as one of the standard free processes in quantum thermodynamics. Although they admit a simple mathematical structure, their operational significance has been unclear due to the potential hidden cost to implement them using an operatioanlly motivated class of operations, such as thermal operations. Here, we show that this hidden cost can be infinite -- we present a family of Gibbs-preserving operations that cannot be implemented by thermal operations aided by any finite amount of quantum coherence. Our result implies that there are uncountably many Gibbs-preserving operations that require unbounded thermodynamic resources to implement, raising a question about employing Gibbs-preserving operations as available thermodynamics processes. This finding is a consequence of the general lower bounds we provide for the coherence cost of approximately implementing a certain class of Gibbs-preserving operations with a desired accuracy. We find that our lower bound is almost tight, identifying a quantity -- related to the energy change caused by the channel to implement -- as a fundamental quantifier characterizing the coherence cost for the approximate implementation of Gibbs-preserving operations.