A new coherence measure based on fidelity

C. L. Liu, Da-Jian Zhang, Xiao-Dong Yu, Qi-Ming Ding, Longjiang Liu

Published 2017-06-24Version 1

Quantifying coherence is an essential endeavor for both quantum foundations and quantum technologies. In this paper, we put forward a quantitative measure of coherence by following the axiomatic definition of coherence measures introduced in [T. Baumgratz, M. Cramer, and M. B. Plenio, Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 140401 (2014)]. Our measure is based on fidelity and analytically computable for arbitrary states of a qubit. As one of its applications, we show that our measure can be used to examine whether a pure qubit state can be transformed into another pure or mixed qubit state only by incoherent operations.