How to quantify coherence: Distinguishing speakable and unspeakable notions

Abstract

Quantum coherence is a critical resource for many operational tasks. Understanding how to quantify and manipulate it also promises to have applications for a diverse set of problems in theoretical physics. For certain applications, however, one requires coherence between the eigenspaces of specific physical observables, such as energy, angular momentum, or photon number, and it makes a difference which eigenspaces appear in the superposition. For others, there is a preferred set of subspaces relative to which coherence is deemed a resource, but it is irrelevant which of the subspaces appear in the superposition. We term these two types of coherence unspeakable and speakable, respectively. We argue that a useful approach to quantifying and characterizing unspeakable coherence is provided by the resource theory of asymmetry when the symmetry group is a group of translations, and we translate a number of prior results on asymmetry into the language of coherence. We also highlight some of the applications of this approach, for instance, in the context of quantum metrology, quantum speed limits, quantum thermodynamics, and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR). The question of how best to treat speakable coherence as a resource is also considered. We review a popular approach in terms of operations that preserve the set of incoherent states, propose an alternative approach in terms of operations that are covariant under dephasing, and we outline the challenge of providing a physical justification for either approach. Finally, we note some mathematical connections that hold among the different approaches to quantifying coherence.