Quantifying the coherence of pure quantum states

Jianxin Chen, Nathaniel Johnston, Chi-Kwong Li, Sarah Plosker

Published 2016-01-23Version 1

In recent years, several measures have been proposed for characterizing the coherence of a given quantum state. We derive several results that illuminate how these measures behave when restricted to pure states. Notably, we present an explicit characterization of the closest incoherent state to a given pure state under the trace distance measure of coherence, and we affirm a recent conjecture that the $\ell_1$ measure of coherence of a pure state is never smaller than its relative entropy of coherence. We then use our result to show that the states maximizing the trace distance of coherence are exactly the maximally coherent states, and we derive a new inequality relating the negativity and distillable entanglement of pure states.