The remarkable phenomenon of catalyst tells us that adding a catalyst could help state transformation. In this paper, we consider the problem of catalyst-assisted probabilistic coherence distillation for mixed states under strictly incoherent operations. To this end, we first present the necessary and sufficient conditions for distilling a target pure coherent state from an initial mixed state via stochastic strictly incoherent operations and the maximal probability of obtaining the target pure state from the initial state. With the help of these results, we present the necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of a catalyst that increases the maximal transformation probability.

• Received 28 August 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.101.012313