In 2021, while Zooming with Henrik on writing the review on catalysis, he said to me, "you know, I recently discovered something quite surprising about thermal operations. They are essentially the only type of Gibbs-preserving operations that, when the system initial state is already Gibbs, then the environment is also left unchanged. " I was surprised and impressed! Henrik then said that a manuscript was in preparation together with Paul Boes and Seok Hyung Lie, which among this particular result, also established a strict hierarchy between lying between random unitary channels and the full set of unital channels -- with catalytic channels, unital thermal operations and factorizable channels as ``layers of the onion."

Then, about three years passed until Jeongrak and I (together with a bunch of comrades) were considering robust forms of catalysis, and asked ourselves if thermal operations exhibit any robust catalytic advantage. For quite some time, we didn't get anywhere. Then something clicked and I started wondering if that property of thermal operations Henrik told me about would actually give us a proof for this. Long story short.... turns out that yes! In fact, Jeongrak found the proof later independently, and it worked essentially the same as the proof for Henrik's statement. We then got in touch with Seok Hyung, and Henrik, and they generously invited us to join forces to contribute to the final version of the paper. I feel super privileged to be part of the process :D

Find out more about the specifics of our results here!