Maximally coherent mixed states: Complementarity between maximal coherence and mixedness

Quantum coherence is a key element in topical research on quantum resource theories and a primary facilitator for design and implementation of quantum technologies. However, the resourcefulness of quantum coherence is severely restricted by environmental noise, which is indicated by the loss of information in a quantum system, measured in terms of its purity. In this work, we derive the limits imposed by the mixedness of a quantum system on the amount of quantum coherence that it can possess. We obtain an analytical trade-off between the two quantities that upperbound the maximum quantum coherence for fixed mixedness in a system. This gives rise to a class of quantum states, "maximally coherent mixed states," whose coherence cannot be increased further under any purity-preserving operation. For the above class of states, quantum coherence and mixedness satisfy a complementarity relation, which is crucial to understand the interplay between a resource and noise in open quantum systems.

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