Generic aspects of the resource theory of quantum coherence

The class of incoherent operations induces a preorder on the set of quantum pure states, defined by the possibility of converting one state into the other by transformations within the class. We prove that if two n-dimensional pure states are chosen independently according to the natural uniform distribution, then the probability that they are comparable vanishes as n→∞. We also study the maximal success probability of incoherent conversions and find an explicit formula for its large-n asymptotic distribution. Our analysis is based on the observation that the extreme values (largest and smallest components) of a random point uniformly sampled from the unit simplex are distributed asymptotically as certain explicit homogeneous Markov chains.