In recent years it was recognized that properties of physical systems such as
entanglement, athermality, and asymmetry, can be viewed as resources for
important tasks in quantum information, thermodynamics, and other areas of
physics. This recognition followed by the development of specific quantum
resource theories (QRTs), such as entanglement theory, determining how quantum
states that cannot be prepared under certain restrictions may be manipulated
and used to circumvent the restrictions. Here we discuss the general structure
of QRTs, and show that under a few assumptions (such as convexity of the set of
free states), a QRT is asymptotically reversible if its set of allowed
operations is maximal; that is, if the allowed operations are the set of all
operations that do not generate (asymptotically) a resource. In this case, the
asymptotic conversion rate is given in terms of the regularized relative
entropy of a resource which is the unique measure/quantifier of the resource in
the asymptotic limit of many copies of the state. This measure also equals the
smoothed version of the logarithmic robustness of the resource.Comment: 5 pages, no figures, few references added, published versio