We investigate the generic aspects of quantum coherence guided by the concentration of measure phenomenon. We find the average relative entropy of coherence of pure quantum states sampled randomly from the uniform Haar measure and show that it is typical, i.e., the probability that the relative entropy of coherence of a randomly chosen pure state is not equal to the average relative entropy of coherence (within an arbitrarily small error) is exponentially small in the dimension of the Hilbert space. We find the dimension of a random subspace of the total Hilbert space such that all pure states that reside on it almost always have at least a fixed nonzero amount of the relative entropy of coherence that is arbitrarily close to the typical value of coherence. Further, we show, with high probability, every state (pure or mixed) in this subspace also has the coherence of formation at least equal to the same fixed nonzero amount of the typical value of coherence. Thus, the states from these random subspaces can be useful in the relevant coherence consuming tasks like catalysis in the coherence resource theory. Moreover, we calculate the expected trace distance between the diagonal part of a random pure quantum state and the maximally mixed state and find that it does not approach to zero in the asymptotic limit. This establishes that randomly chosen pure states are not typically maximally coherent (within an arbitrarily small error). Additionally, we find the lower bound on the relative entropy of coherence for the set of pure states whose diagonal parts are at a fixed most probable distance from the maximally mixed state.

• Received 7 October 2015
• Revised 14 January 2016

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.93.032125