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arXiv:1004.0190 · Physical Review Letters

Necessary and Sufficient Condition for Nonzero Quantum Discord

Borivoje Dakić, Vlatko Vedral, Časlav Brukner

Published Nov 2, 2010• 1,205 citations
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Abstract

Quantum discord characterizes "nonclassicality" of correlations in quantum mechanics. It has been proposed as the key resource present in certain quantum communication tasks and quantum computational models without containing much entanglement. We obtain a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of nonzero quantum discord for any dimensional bipartite states. This condition is easily experimentally implementable. Based on this, we propose a geometrical way of quantifying quantum discord. For two qubits this results in a closed form of expression for discord. We apply our results to the model of deterministic quantum computation with one qubit, showing that quantum discord is unlikely to be the reason behind its speedup.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.105.190502

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Quantum discord characterizes "nonclassicality" of correlations in quantum mechanics. It has been proposed as the key resource present in certain quantum communication tasks and quantum computational models without containing much entanglement. We obtain a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of nonzero quantum discord for any dimensional bipartite states. This condition is easily experimentally implementable. Based on this, we propose a geometrical way of quantifying quantum discord. For two qubits this results in a closed form of expression for discord. We apply our results to the model of deterministic quantum computation with one qubit, showing that quantum discord is unlikely to be the reason behind its speedup.
Quantum discord provides a promising measure for the quantum correlation beyond entanglement, and may be responsible for the quantum speedup in certain quantum computing tasks. Here, we propose a necessary and sufficient condition for nonzero quantum discord in continuous variable systems, which is simple and easy to perform in terms of a marker QQQ. In order to obtain this condition, we introduce the continuous-variable local orthogonal basis of the operator space generalized from the orthogonal basis sets in local operator space for discrete variables. Based on this, we derive an explicit expression of the marker QQQ for all the two-mode states, and present examples of all Gaussian states and several non-Gaussian states. Our result provides a candidate for quantum correlation measures, and can be easily measured by a designed quantum circuit.
We use quantum discord to characterize the correlations present in the model called deterministic quantum computation with one quantum bit (DQC1), introduced by Knill and Laflamme [Phys. Rev. Lett. 81, 5672 (1998)10.1103/PhysRevLett.81.5672]. The model involves a collection of qubits in the completely mixed state coupled to a single control qubit that has nonzero purity. The initial state, operations, and measurements in the model all point to a natural bipartite split between the control qubit and the mixed ones. Although there is no entanglement between these two parts, we show that the quantum discord across this split is nonzero for typical instances of the DQC1 ciruit. Nonzero values of discord indicate the presence of nonclassical correlations. We propose quantum discord as figure of merit for characterizing the resources present in this computational model.
Quantum discord, as introduced by Olliver and Zurek [Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 017901 (2001)], is a measure of the discrepancy between two natural yet different quantum analogs of the classical mutual information. This notion characterizes and quantifies quantumness of correlations in bipartite states from a measurement perspective, and is fundamentally different from the various entanglement measures in the entanglement vs separability paradigm. The phenomenon of nonzero quantum discord is a manifestation of quantum correlations due to noncommutativity rather than due to entanglement, and has interesting and significant applications in revealing the advantage of certain quantum tasks. We will evaluate analytically the quantum discord for a large family of two-qubit states, and make a comparative study of the relationships between classical and quantum correlations in terms of the quantum discord. We furthermore compare the quantum discord with the entanglement of formation, and illustrate that the latter may be larger than the former, although for separable states, the entanglement of formation always vanishes and thus is less than the quantum discord.
Quantum discord quantifies quantum correlations beyond entanglement and assumes nonzero values, which are notoriously hard to compute, for almost all quantum states. Here we provide computable tight bounds for the quantum discord for qubit-qudit states. In the case of two qubits our lower and upper bounds coincide for a 7-parameter family of filtered XXX-states, whose quantum discords can therefore be evaluated analytically. An application to the accessible information of the binary qubit channel is also presented. For the qubit-qudit state output by the circuit of deterministic computation with one qubit, nontrivial lower and upper bounds that respect the zero-discord conditions are obtained for its quantum discord.
We present a reliable algorithm to evaluate quantum discord for general two-qubit states, amending and extending an approach recently put forward for the subclass of XXX states. A closed expression for the discord of arbitrary states of two qubits cannot be obtained, as the optimization problem for the conditional entropy requires the solution to a pair of transcendental equations in the state parameters. We apply our algorithm to run a numerical comparison between quantum discord and an alternative, computable measure of nonclassical correlations, namely, the geometric discord. We identify the extremally nonclassically correlated two-qubit states according to the (normalized) geometric discord, at a fixed value of the conventional quantum discord. The latter cannot exceed the square root of the former for systems of two qubits.
Like entanglement, quantum discord quantifies the quantum correlations. Unlike entanglement, whose detection is extremely difficult, the quantum discord of an arbitrary bipartite state allows itself to be detected perfectly by a single observable, the quantum discord witness. In particular, we report a single observable whose expectation value provides a necessary and sufficient condition for the vanishing quantum discord of an arbitrary bipartite unknown state with four copies. A quantum circuit is designed to measure the quantum discord witness by using only local qubit-measurements.