Local Purity Distillation in Quantum Systems: Exploring the Complementarity Between Purity and Entanglement

Abstract

Quantum thermodynamics and quantum entanglement represent two pivotal quantum resource theories with significant relevance in quantum information science. Despite their importance, the intricate relationship between these two theories is still not fully understood. Here, we delve into the interplay between entanglement and thermodynamics, particularly in the context of local cooling processes. We introduce and develop the framework of Gibbs-preserving local operations and classical communication. Within this framework, we explore strategies enabling remote parties to effectively cool their local systems to the ground state. Our analysis is centered on scenarios where only a single copy of a quantum state is accessible, with the ideal performance defined by the highest possible fidelity to the ground state achievable under these constraints. We focus on systems with fully degenerate local Hamiltonians, where local cooling aligns with the extraction of local purity. In this context, we establish a powerful link between the efficiency of local purity extraction and the degree of entanglement present in the system, a concept we define as purity-entanglement complementarity. Moreover, we demonstrate that in many pertinent scenarios, the optimal performance can be precisely determined through semidefinite programming techniques. Our findings open doors to various practical applications, including techniques for entanglement detection and estimation. We demonstrate this by evaluating the amount of entanglement for a class of bound entangled states.