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Are all quantum resource theories secretly the same thing?

Moein Naseri, Chirag Srivastava, Chandan Datta, John H. Selby, Shubhayan Sarkar

May 29, 2026

Quantum resource theories — the formalism describing what makes quantum states useful — turn out to share deep geometric equivalences when their free states form polytopes. Any two such theories with the same number of pure extremal free states are physically equivalent up to rescaling, meaning coherence and magic aren't as different as they look. The result offers a unified map of which quantum advantages are genuinely distinct and which are just different faces of the same geometry.
Published as Polytopic Quantum Resource Theories: Geometry and Structures arXiv:2606.00429
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