Quantifying channel coherence via the norm distance

Abstract Quantifying the number of resources contained in a physical object has been one of the core topics in the resource theory of coherence. In this paper, we introduce the dynamical coherence measures based on a class of norms in the classical channel setting. It is proved that it satisfies faithfulness, decreases monotonically under the maximally incoherent superchannels, and is convex. Moreover, we show that it satisfies subadditivity under both the composition and tensor product of channels. Especially, the diamond measure as a special case is discussed in detail, it can reduce to trace norm of coherence, satisfies amortization inequality, and can be calculated efficiently using a semidefinite program. In addition, we introduce the creation-coherent diamond measure and find that neither the detection coherence nor the creation coherence of a channel exceeds the coherence of the channel, which does not exceed the purity of the channel. Second, we introduce the corresponding dephasing measure, which is a dynamical coherence measure under the dephasing-covariant incoherent superchannels. Meanwhile, we also introduce the dephasing diamond measure as a special case. Third, we use the dephasing diamond measure to accurately calculate the coherence values of some important noisy channels such as amplitude damping channel, phase damping channel, and depolarizing channel, respectively, and give the sufficient and necessary conditions for an unital qubit channel with a parameter probability vector to be a coherent channel. Finally, the operational interpretation of our diamond measure in the binary channel discrimination task is investigated.