Catalytic Enhancement of Coherence in Noisy Quantum Channels and Characterization of Strictly Incoherent Operations

Abstract

In realistic quantum information processing tasks, quantum states are inevitably affected by environmental noise, leading to decoherence and degradation of useful quantum resources. The coherence fraction, which serves as an important figure of merit for several quantum protocols, may decrease significantly after the action of a noisy channel. Such degradation can result in unsatisfactory performance in real-world applications. In this work, we investigate whether catalysis can be used to pre-process the input state to enhance the coherence fraction of an output state from a quantum channel. Specifically, we study whether using a processed state $ρ_s'$ as the input to a quantum channel $Λ$, instead of the original state $ρ_s$, can yield an output state $Λ(ρ_s')$ whose coherence fraction exceeds that of $Λ(ρ_s)$. We analyze the conditions under which such an improvement is possible. We also provide a practical application of our setup for the phase discrimination task. Furthermore, we establish a necessary and sufficient condition for an incoherent state preserving CPTP(Completely Positive Trace Preserving) map $\mathcal{E}$ to be a particular type of Strictly Incoherent Operation (SIO). This characterization provides a new structural understanding of SIO and clarifies its role in coherence manipulation. Our results offer practical insights into coherence preservation and enhancement in noisy quantum processes and may be useful for optimizing quantum information protocols under realistic conditions. We also provide numerical examples to support our claims.