Which Bath-Hamiltonians Matter for Thermal Operations?

TL;DR

This paper investigates the mathematical structure of thermal operations, focusing on Hamiltonians with resonant spectra, their continuity properties, and a semigroup representation in two dimensions, with implications for qubit systems.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of resonant spectrum Hamiltonians for thermal operations and provides a semigroup representation for two-dimensional cases, including visualization and properties of the set.

Findings

Thermal operations can be characterized by Hamiltonians with resonant spectra.

The set of thermal operations is discontinuous at Hamiltonians with degenerate Bohr spectra.

In two dimensions, thermal operations form a convex set and are commutative in the qubit case.

Abstract

In this article we explore the set of thermal operations from a mathematical and topological point of view. First we introduce the concept of Hamiltonians with resonant spectrum with respect to some reference Hamiltonian, followed by proving that when defining thermal operations it suffices to only consider bath Hamiltonians which satisfy this resonance property. Next we investigate continuity of the set of thermal operations in certain parameters, such as energies of the system and temperature of the bath. We will see that the set of thermal operations changes discontinuously with respect to the Hausdorff metric at any Hamiltonian which has so-called degenerate Bohr spectrum, regardless of the temperature. Finally we find a semigroup representation of the (enhanced) thermal operations in two dimensions by characterizing any such operation via three real parameters, thus allowing for a visualization of this set. Using this, in the qubit case we show commutativity of the (enhanced) thermal operations as well as convexity of the thermal operations without the closure. The latter is done by specifying the elements of this set exactly.