Entanglement boost for extractable work from ensembles of quantum batteries.

Motivated by the recent interest in thermodynamics of micro- and mesoscopic quantum systems we study the maximal amount of work that can be reversibly extracted from a quantum system used to temporarily store energy. Guided by the notion of passivity of a quantum state we show that entangling unitary controls extract in general more work than independent ones. In the limit of a large number of copies one can reach the thermodynamical bound given by the variational principle for the free energy.

Universal bounds for the Holevo quantity, coherent information, and the Jensen-Shannon divergence.

The mutual information between the sender of a classical message encoded in quantum carriers and a receiver is fundamentally limited by the Holevo quantity. Using strong subadditivity of entropy, we prove that the Holevo quantity is not larger than an exchange entropy. This implies an upper bound for coherent information. Moreover, restricting our attention to classical information, we bound the transmission distance between probability distributions by their entropic distance, which is a concave function of their Hellinger distance.