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  • Letter
  • Open Access

Experimentally realized local-global trade-off in quantum resources

Yue Dai1,2,*, Zhiyu Wang1,*, Xinzhi Zhao1,3, Xinglei Yu1,4, and Chengjie Zhang1,†

  • *These authors contributed equally to this work.
  • †Contact author: chengjie.zhang@gmail.com
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Phys. Rev. Research 8, L022041 – Published 3 June, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/dpjr-2xz5

Abstract

The interconversion among different quantum resources has attracted considerable attention, exemplified by the trade-off between coherence and entanglement. However, the relationship between local and global quantum resources remains largely unexplored. Here, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a local-global trade-off in quantum resources, quantified, respectively, by the local maximum coherence and the quantum mutual information. Our experiments show that the sum of the local maximum coherence and the quantum mutual information is bounded by a definitive upper limit. These results not only establish a fundamental trade-off inequality, but also provide direct experimental evidence of the complementarity between local and global quantum resources. Moreover, our findings reveal an important constraint in quantum networks: The local quantum resources available at individual nodes and the global quantum resources of the network are mutually exclusive, implying that enhancing one necessarily limits the other.

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Phys. Rev. Research 8, L022041– Published 3 June, 2026
  • Received 16 December 2024
  • Revised 22 December 2025
  • Accepted 6 May 2026
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Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.

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