All states are universal catalysts in quantum thermodynamics

Abstract

Quantum catalysis is a fascinating concept which demonstrates that certain transformations can only become possible when given access to a specific resource that has to be returned unaffected. It was first discovered in the context of entanglement theory and since then applied in a number of resource-theoretic frameworks, including quantum thermodynamics. Although in that case the necessary (and sometimes also sufficient) conditions on the existence of a catalyst are known, almost nothing is known about the precise form of the catalyst state required by the transformation. In particular, it is not clear whether it has to have some special properties or be finely tuned to the desired transformation. In this work we describe a surprising property of multi-copy states: we show that in resource theories governed by majorization all resourceful states are catalysts for all allowed transformations. In quantum thermodynamics this means that the so-called "second laws of thermodynamics" do not require a fine-tuned catalyst but rather any state, given sufficiently many copies, can serve as a useful catalyst. These analytic results are accompanied by several numerical investigations that indicate that neither a multi-copy form nor a very large dimension catalyst are required to activate most allowed transformations catalytically.

17 + 11 pages, 7 figures. Numerical results significantly extended. Comments welcome!

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Cited by in corpus (27)

• Catalytic Transformations of Pure Entangled States
• Catalysis of entanglement and other quantum resources
• Correlation in Catalysts Enables Arbitrary Manipulation of Quantum Coherence
• Fundamental Limits on Correlated Catalytic State Transformations
• Operational definition of the temperature of a quantum state
• Continuous thermomajorization and a complete set of laws for Markovian thermal processes
• Optimizing thermalizations
• Fundamental limits on anomalous energy flows in correlated quantum systems
• Catalytic leverage of correlations and mitigation of dissipation in Information erasure
• Catalytic Transformations in Coherence Theory
• Catalysis in Action via Elementary Thermal Operations
• Entanglement catalysis for quantum states and noisy channels
• Thermodynamically free quantum measurements
• Catalytic Gaussian thermal operations
• Quantum catalysis in cavity quantum electrodynamics
• Complete Characterization of Entanglement Embezzlement
• Catalytic transformations for thermal operations
• Quantum dichotomies and coherent thermodynamics beyond first-order asymptotics
• Communication with Quantum Catalysts
• Catalytic transformations with finite-size environments: applications to cooling and thermometry
• Role of energy-invariant assistants in energy extraction from quantum batteries
• Cooling and work extraction under memory-assisted Markovian thermal processes
• Minimizing Dissipation via Interacting Environments: Quadratic Convergence to Landauer Bound
• Unlocking inaccessible performance of the quantum refrigerator with catalysts
• Statistics of Entanglement Transformation with Hierarchies among Catalysts
• Finite-size catalysis in quantum resource theories
• Quantum geometric tensor determines the pure-state i.i.d. conversion rate in the resource theory of asymmetry for any compact Lie group