The power of quantum catalytic local operations

Abstract: A key result in entanglement theory is that the addition of a catalyst dramatically enlarges the set of possible state transformations via local operations and classical communication (LOCC). However, it remains unclear what is the interplay between classical communication and quantum catalysis. Here our aim is to disentangle the effect of the catalyst from that of classical communication. To do so, we explore a class of state transformations termed catalytic local operations (CLO) and compare it to LOCC and to stochastic LOCC augmented by bounded quantum communication. We show that these classes are incomparable and capture different facets of quantum state transformations.