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arXiv:1002.4913 · Physical Review A

Quantum discord, local operations, and Maxwell’s demons

Aharon Brodutch, Daniel R. Terno

Published Jun 4, 2010• 114 citations
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Abstract

Quantum discord was proposed as a measure of the quantumness of correlations. There are at least three different discordlike quantities, two of which determine the difference between the efficiencies of a Szilard's engine under different sets of restrictions. The three discord measures vanish simultaneously. We introduce an easy way to test for zero discord, relate it to the Cerf-Adami conditional entropy and show that there is no simple relation between the discord and the local distinguishability.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.81.062103

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Quantum discord was proposed as a measure of the quantumness of correlations. There are at least three different discordlike quantities, two of which determine the difference between the efficiencies of a Szilard's engine under different sets of restrictions. The three discord measures vanish simultaneously. We introduce an easy way to test for zero discord, relate it to the Cerf-Adami conditional entropy and show that there is no simple relation between the discord and the local distinguishability.
Quantum discord is usually referred to as a measure for quantum correlations. In the search of the fundamental resource to gain a quantum advantage in quantum information applications, quantum discord is considered a promising candidate. In this paper we present an alternative view on quantum correlations in terms of the rank of the correlation matrix as introduced by Daki\ifmmode \acute{c}\else \'{c}\fi{}, Vedral, and Brukner [Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 190502 (2010)]. According to our analysis, information about the quantum discord does not necessarily determine the amount of quantum correlations but rather the quantumness of the state. Nonzero quantum discord is only a necessary but not a sufficient condition for correlations above the classically achievable limit. This becomes clear when we consider states of nonzero discord, which can be created from zero discord states only by a single local operation. We further show that the set of these states has measure zero.
Quantum discord has been studied extensively as a measure of nonclassical correlations which includes entanglement as a subset. Although it is well known that nonzero discord can exist without entanglement, the origin of quantum discord is not well understood as compared to entanglement, which manifests itself more simply as inseparable higher-dimensional quantum superposition. In this paper we establish the discordlike correlation of bipartite coherence and then compare it to quantum discord. Consequently, we show that the minimum of the discordlike correlation of coherence coincides with the original quantum discord. This demonstrates quantum discord as the irreducible correlated bipartite coherence. In addition, the discordlike correlated coherence is shown to admit the postulates of the quantum resource theory (QRT), although the original quantum discord is not a ``good'' candidate under the QRT. We also find that the relative entropy measure induced from the discordlike coherence is a well-defined coherence measure for bipartite states.
Several ways have been proposed in the literature to define a coherence measure based on Tsallis relative entropy. One of them is defined as a distance between a state and a set of incoherent states with Tsallis relative entropy taken as a distance measure. Unfortunately, this measure does not satisfy the required strong monotonicity, but a modification of this coherence has been proposed that does. We introduce three new Tsallis coherence measures coming from a more general definition that also satisfy the strong monotonicity, and compare all five definitions between each other. Using three coherence measures that we discuss, one can also define a discord. Two of these have been used in the literature, and another one is new. We also discuss two correlation measures based on Tsallis relative entropy. We provide explicit expressions for all three discord and two correlation measure on pure states. Lastly, we provide tight upper and lower bounds on two discord and correlations measures on any quantum state, with the condition for equality.
Characterizing genuine multipartite quantum correlations in quantum physical systems has historically been a challenging problem in quantum information theory. More recently, however, the total correlation or multipartite information measure has been helpful in accomplishing this goal, especially with the multipartite symmetric quantum (MSQ) discord (Piani et al. 2008 Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 090502. ( doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.100.090502 )) and the conditional entanglement of multipartite information (CEMI) (Yang et al. 2008 Phys. Rev. Lett. 101, 140501. ( doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.101.140501 )). Here, we apply a recent and significant improvement of strong subadditivity of quantum entropy (Fawzi & Renner 2014 ( http://arxiv.org/abs/1410.0664 )) in order to develop these quantities further. In particular, we prove that the MSQ discord is nearly equal to zero if and only if the multipartite state for which it is evaluated is approximately locally recoverable after performing measurements on each of its systems. Furthermore, we prove that the CEMI is a faithful entanglement measure, i.e. it vanishes if and only if the multipartite state for which it is evaluated is a fully separable state. Along the way, we provide an operational interpretation of the MSQ discord in terms of the partial state distribution protocol, which in turn, as a special case, gives an interpretation for the original discord quantity. Finally, we prove an inequality that could potentially improve upon the Fawzi–Renner inequality in the multipartite context, but it remains an open question to determine whether this is so.
The quantumness of the correlation known as quantum correlation is usually measured by quantum discord. So far various quantum discords can be roughly understood as indirect measure by some special discrepancy of two quantities. We present a direct measure of quantum correlation by revealing the difference between the structures of classically and quantum correlated states. Our measure explicitly includes the contributions of the inseparability and local nonorthogonality of the eigenvectors of a density matrix. Besides its relatively easy computability, our measure can provide a unified understanding of quantum correlation of all the present versions.