| Summary: | The search for a simple description of fundamental physical processes is an important part of quantum theory. One example for such an abstraction can be found in the distance lab paradigm: if two separated parties are connected via a classical channel, it is notoriously difficult to characterize all possible operations these parties can perform. This class of operations is widely known as local operations and classical communication. Surprisingly, the situation becomes comparably simple if the more general class of separable operations is considered, a finding that has been extensively used in quantum information theory for many years. Here, we propose a related approach for the resource theory of quantum coherence, where two distant parties can perform only measurements that do not create coherence and can communicate their outcomes via a classical channel. We call this class local incoherent operations and classical communication. While the characterization of this class is also difficult in general, we show that the larger class of separable incoherent operations has a simple mathematical form, yet still preserves the main features of local incoherent operations and classical communication. We demonstrate the relevance of our approach by applying it to three different tasks: assisted coherence distillation, quantum teleportation, and single-shot quantum state merging. We expect that the results we obtain in this work also transfer to other concepts of coherence that are discussed in recent literature. The approach we present here opens new ways to study the resource theory of coherence in distributed scenarios.
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