Quantum coherence is a fundamental manifestation of the quantum superposition principle. Recently, Baumgratz et al. [ Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 140401 (2014)] presented a rigorous framework to quantify coherence from the view of theory of physical resource. Here we propose a new valid quantum coherence measure which is a convex roof measure, for a quantum system of arbitrary dimension, essentially using the generalized Gell-Mann matrices. Rigorous proof shows that the proposed coherence measure, coherence concurrence, fulfills all the requirements dictated by the resource theory of quantum coherence measures. Moreover, strong links between the resource frameworks of coherence concurrence and entanglement concurrence is derived, which shows that any degree of coherence with respect to some reference basis can be converted to entanglement via incoherent operations. Our work provides a clear quantitative and operational connection between coherence and entanglement based on two kinds of concurrence. This new coherence measure, coherence concurrence, may also be beneficial to the study of quantum coherence.

The quantification of the quantumness of a quantum ensemble has theoretical and practical significance in quantum information theory. We propose herein a class of measures of the quantumness of quantum ensembles using the unitary similarity invariant norms of the commutators of the constituent density operators of an ensemble. Rigorous proof shows that they share desirable properties for a measure of quantumness, such as positivity, unitary invariance, concavity under probabilistic union, convexity under state decomposition, decreasing under coarse graining, and increasing under fine graining. Several specific examples illustrate the applications of these measures of quantumness in studying quantum information.

In this paper, we focus on two different kinds of multipartite correlation, k-nonseparability and k-partite entanglement, both of which can describe the essential characteristics of multipartite entanglement. We propose effective methods to detect k-nonseparability and k-partite entanglement in terms of quantum Fisher information. We illustrate the significance of our results and show that they identify some k-nonseparability and k-partite entanglement that cannot be identified by known criteria by several concrete examples.

Concurrence, as one of entanglement measures, is a useful tool to characterize quantum entanglement in various quantum systems. However, the computation of the concurrence involves difficult optimizations and only for the case of two qubits an exact formula was found. We investigate the concurrence of four-qubit quantum states and derive analytical lower bound of concurrence using the multiqubit monogamy inequality. It is shown that this lower bound is able to improve the existing bounds. This approach can be generalized to arbitrary qubit systems. We present an exact formula of concurrence for some mixed quantum states. For even-qubit states, we derive an improved lower bound of concurrence using a monogamy equality for qubit systems. At the same time, we show that a multipartite state is k-nonseparable if the multipartite concurrence is larger than a constant related to the value of k, the qudit number and the dimension of the subsystems. Our results can be applied to detect the multipartite k-nonseparable states.

We investigate the distributions of quantum coherence characterized by superadditivity relations in multipartite quantum systems. General superadditivity inequalities based on the αth (α ⩾ 1) power of l 1 norm of coherence are presented for multiqubit states, which include the existing ones as special cases. Our result is shown to be tighter than the existing one by a specific example.