Passivity is a fundamental concept that constitutes a necessary condition for any quantum system to attain thermodynamic equilibrium, and for a notion of temperature to emerge. While extensive work has been done that exploits this, the transition from passivity at a single-shot level to the completely passive Gibbs state is technically clear but lacks a good over-arching intuition. Here, we reformulate passivity for quantum systems in purely geometric terms. This description makes the emergence of the Gibbs state from passive states entirely transparent. Beyond clarifying existing results, it also provides novel analysis for non-equilibrium quantum systems. We show that, to every passive state, one can associate a simple convex shape in a 2-dimensional plane, and that the area of this shape measures the degree to which the system deviates from the manifold of equilibrium states. This provides a novel geometric measure of athermality with relations to both ergotropy and β--athermality.

Recently a complete set of entropic conditions has been derived for the interconversion structure of states under quantum operations that respect a specified symmetry action, however the core structure of these conditions is still only partially understood.Here we develop a coarse-grained description with the aim of shedding light on both the structure and the complexity of this general problem. Specifically, we consider the degree to which one can associate a basic 'shape' property to a quantum state or channel that captures coarse-grained data either for state interconversion or for the use of a state within a simulation protocol. We provide a complete solution for the twoqubit case under the rotation group, give analysis for the more general case and discuss possible extensions of the approach.