The second law of thermodynamics places a limitation into which states a system can evolve into. For systems in contact with a heat bath, it can be combined with the law of energy conservation, and it says that a system can only evolve into another if the free energy goes down. Recently, it's been shown that there are actually many second laws, and that it is only for large macroscopic systems that they all become equivalent to the ordinary one. These additional second laws also hold for quantum systems, and are, in fact, often more relevant in this regime. They place a restriction on how the probabilities of energy levels can evolve. Here, we consider additional restrictions on how the coherences between energy levels can evolve. Coherences can only go down, and we provide a set of restrictions which limit the extent to which they can be maintained. We find that coherences over energy levels must decay at rates that are suitably adapted to the transition rates between energy levels. We show that the limitations are matched in the case of a single qubit, in which case we obtain the full characterization of state-to-state transformations. For higher dimensions, we conjecture that more severe constraints exist. We also introduce a new class of thermodynamical operations which allow for greater manipulation of coherences and study its power with respect to a class of operations known as thermal operations.

Port-based teleportation (PBT), introduced in 2008, is a type of quantum teleportation protocol which transmits the state to the receiver without requiring any corrections on the receiver’s side. Evaluating the performance of PBT was computationally intractable and previous attempts succeeded only with small systems. We study PBT protocols and fully characterize their performance for arbitrary dimensions and number of ports. We develop new mathematical tools to study the symmetries of the measurement operators that arise in these protocols and belong to the algebra of partially transposed permutation operators. First, we develop the representation theory of the mentioned algebra which provides an elegant way of understanding the properties of subsystems of a large system with general symmetries. In particular, we introduce the theory of the partially reduced irreducible representations which we use to obtain a simpler representation of the algebra of partially transposed permutation operators and thus explicitly determine the properties of any port-based teleportation scheme for fixed dimension in polynomial time.

Deterministic port-based teleportation (dPBT) protocol is a scheme where a quantum state is guaranteed to be transferred to another system without unitary correction. We characterise the best achievable performance of the dPBT when both the resource state and the measurement is optimised. Surprisingly, the best possible fidelity for an arbitrary number of ports and dimension of the teleported state is given by the largest eigenvalue of a particular matrix-Teleportation Matrix. It encodes the relationship between a certain set of Young diagrams and emerges as the optimal solution to the relevant semidefinite programme.

We consider the structure of algebra of operators, acting in n−fold tensor product space, which are partially transposed on the last term. Using purely algebraical methods we show that this algebra is semi-simple and then, considering its regular representation, we derive basic properties of the algebra. In particular, we describe all irreducible representations of the algebra of partially transposed operators and derive expressions for matrix elements of the representations. It appears that there are two types of irreducible representations of the algebra. The first one is strictly connected with the representations of the group S(n − 1) induced by irreducible representations of the group S(n − 2). The second type is structurally connected with irreducible representations of the group S(n − 1).