Understanding the resource consumption in distributed scenarios is one of the
main goals of quantum information theory. A prominent example for such a
scenario is the task of quantum state merging where two parties aim to merge
their parts of a tripartite quantum state. In standard quantum state merging,
entanglement is considered as an expensive resource, while local quantum
operations can be performed at no additional cost. However, recent developments
show that some local operations could be more expensive than others: it is
reasonable to distinguish between local incoherent operations and local
operations which can create coherence. This idea leads us to the task of
incoherent quantum state merging, where one of the parties has free access to
local incoherent operations only. In this case the resources of the process are
quantified by pairs of entanglement and coherence. Here, we develop tools for
studying this process, and apply them to several relevant scenarios. While
quantum state merging can lead to a gain of entanglement, our results imply
that no merging procedure can gain entanglement and coherence at the same time.
We also provide a general lower bound on the entanglement-coherence sum, and
show that the bound is tight for all pure states. Our results also lead to an
incoherent version of Schumacher compression: in this case the compression rate
is equal to the von Neumann entropy of the diagonal elements of the
corresponding quantum state.Comment: 9 pages, 1 figure. Lemma 5 in Appendix D of the previous version was
not correct. This did not affect the results of the main tex
