Quantum Coherence and Distinguishability: A Resource-Theoretic Perspective on Wave-Particle Duality

Wave-particle duality, the cornerstone of quantum mechanics, illustrates essential trade-offs between two complementary aspects of quantum systems. Captured by Bohr's complementarity principle, the wave-particle duality relation indicates that perfect path discrimination in a multipath interferometer obliterates interference patterns and vice versa. In this work, from the perspective of coherence resource manipulation, we uncover a novel duality relation between quantum coherence and distinguishability in ensembles of mutually orthogonal pure states. We demonstrate the sum of `co-bits', coherence preserved after discrimination, and classical bits, distinguishability extracted through perfect discrimination is bounded. One cannot simultaneously extract all classical information and preserve coherence. Such duality relation exposes an inherent trade-off between quantum coherence and classical distinguishability resources. Our findings offer a fresh perspective and advance our understanding of the intrinsic complementary relationship between quantum and classical resources.