Quantifying resources for the Page-Wootters mechanism: Shared asymmetry as relative entropy of entanglement

Abstract

Recently, some attention has been given to the so-called Page-Wootters mechanism of quantum clocks. Among the various proposals to explore the mechanism using more modern techniques, some have chosen to use a quantum information perspective, defining and using informational measures to quantify how well a quantum system can stand as a reference frame for other quantum system. In this work, we explore the proposal based on a resource theory of asymmetry, known as mutual or shared asymmetry, which actually is equivalent to the approach from coherence theory in the case of interest here: quantum reference frames described by the $\text{U}(1)$ compact group. We extend some previous results in the literature about shared asymmetry and the Page-Wootters mechanism to more general cases, culminating in the enunciation of a theorem relating shared asymmetry of a bipartite state ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{SR}$ with the relative entropy of entanglement of internal states ${\ensuremath{\rho}}_{M}$ on the charge sectors of the Hilbert space ${\mathcal{H}}_{S}\ensuremath{\bigotimes}{\mathcal{H}}_{R}$. Using this result, we reinterpret the relation between the Page-Wootters mechanism and entanglement, and we also open some paths to further studies.