Whether or not you're a fan of thermal operations, there's something fundamentally special about them: by pinning down what it means to equilibrate, thermal operations uniquely emerge! With this, we also uncover nice hierarchy of unital channels, in contrast with the classical Birkhoff theorem.

We put out a systematic study on the extent of robust catalysis! This work was a wonderful experience for me, I hope you'll like it too. Check it out at scirate.com/arxiv/2412.0... !