Experimental study of quantum coherence decomposition and trade-off relations in a tripartite system

Quantum coherence is the most fundamental of all quantum quantifiers, underlying other well-known quantities such as entanglement. It can be distributed in a multipartite system in various ways—for example, in a bipartite system it can exist within subsystems (local coherence) or collectively between the subsystems (global coherence), and exhibits a trade-off relation. In this paper, we experimentally verify these coherence trade-off relations in adiabatically evolved nuclear spin systems using an NMR spectrometer. We study the full set of coherence trade-off relations between the original state, the bipartite product state, the tripartite product state, and the decohered product state. We also experimentally verify the monogamy inequality and show that both the quantum systems are polygamous during the evolution. We find that the properties of the state in terms of coherence and monogamy are equivalent. This illustrates the utility of using coherence as a characterization tool for quantum states.