Detecting coherence with respect to general quantum measurements

TL;DR

This paper develops and experimentally demonstrates witnesses for detecting quantum coherence relative to general measurements, extending the concept beyond standard bases and applying it to quantum parameter estimation.

Contribution

It introduces necessary and sufficient conditions for block and POVM-based coherence witnesses, with practical realization and application in quantum parameter estimation.

Findings

Constructed coherence witnesses with experimental feasibility

Established conditions for coherence detection in general measurements

Applied witnesses to estimate parameters in quantum systems

Abstract

Quantum coherence is a crucial resource in quantum resource theory. Previous study mainly focused on standard coherence under a complete orthogonal reference basis. The standard coherence has recently been extended to general positive-operator-valued measure (POVM)-based coherence, including block coherence as a special case. Therefore, it is necessary to construct block coherence and POVM-based coherence witnesses to detect them. In this work, we present witnesses for block coherence and POVM-based coherence, and obtain the necessary and sufficient conditions for arbitrary block coherence and POVM-based coherence witnesses. We also discuss possible realizations of some block coherence and POVM-based coherence witnesses in experiments, and present examples of measuring block coherence witnesses based on real experimental data. Furthermore, an application of block coherence witnesses has been presented in a quantum parameter estimation task with a degenerate Hamiltonian, and one can estimate the unknown parameter by measuring our block coherence witnesses if the input state is block coherent. Lase but not least, we prove that the quantum Fisher information of any block incoherent state is equal to zero, which coincides with the result from measuring block coherence witnesses.