We show that the resource theory of contextuality does not admit catalysts, i.e., there are no correlations that can enable an otherwise impossible resource conversion and still be recovered afterward. As a corollary, we observe that the same holds for nonlocality. As entanglement allows for catalysts, this adds a further example to the list of “anomalies of entanglement,” showing that nonlocality and entanglement behave differently as resources. We also show that catalysis remains impossible even if, instead of classical randomness, we allow some more powerful behaviors to be used freely in the free transformations of the resource theory.

• Received 17 February 2021
• Accepted 24 August 2021

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.160402