Assisted work distillation

Abstract

We study the process of assisted work distillation. This scenario arises when two parties share a bipartite quantum state $\rho_{AB}$ and their task is to locally distil the optimal amount of work when one party is restricted to thermal operations whereas the other can perform general quantum operations and they are allowed to communicate classically. We demonstrate that this question is intimately related to the distillation of classical/quantum correlations. In particular, we show that the advantage of one party performing global measurements over many copies of $\rho_{AB}$ is related to the non-additivity of the entanglement of formation. We also show that there may exist work bound in the quantum correlations of the state that is only extractable under the wider class of local Gibbs-preserving operations.