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arXiv:1008.4135 · Physical Review A

Interpreting quantum discord through quantum state merging

Vaibhav Madhok, Animesh Datta

Published Mar 31, 2011• 352 citations
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Abstract

We present an operational interpretation of quantum discord based on the quantum state merging protocol. Quantum discord is the markup in the cost of quantum communication in the process of quantum state merging, if one discards relevant prior information. Our interpretation has an intuitive explanation based on the strong subadditivity of von Neumann entropy. We use our result to provide operational interpretations of other quantities like the local purity and quantum deficit. Finally, we discuss in brief some instances where our interpretation is valid in the single-copy scenario.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.83.032323

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We present an operational interpretation of quantum discord based on the quantum state merging protocol. Quantum discord is the markup in the cost of quantum communication in the process of quantum state merging, if one discards relevant prior information. Our interpretation has an intuitive explanation based on the strong subadditivity of von Neumann entropy. We use our result to provide operational interpretations of other quantities like the local purity and quantum deficit. Finally, we discuss in brief some instances where our interpretation is valid in the single-copy scenario.
Positivity of quantum discord is shown to be equivalent to the strong sub additivity of the Von-Nuemann entropy. This leads to a connection between the mother protocol of quantum information theory [A. Abeyesinghe, I. Devetak, P. Hayden, and A. Winter, Proc. R. Soc. A 465, 2537, (2009)] and quantum discord. We exploit this to show that quantum discord is a measure coherence in the performance of the mother protocol. Since the mother protocol is a unification of an important class of problems (those that are bipartite, unidirectional and memoryless), we show quantum discord to be a measure of coherence in these protocols. Our work generalizes an earlier operational interpretation of quantum discord provided in terms of quantum state merging [V. Madhok and A. Datta, Phys. Rev. A 83, 032323, (2011)].
Quantum discord quantifies nonclassical correlations beyond the standard classification of quantum states into entangled and unentangled. Although it has received considerable attention, it still lacks any precise interpretation in terms of some protocol in which quantum features are relevant. Here we give quantum discord its first information-theoretic operational meaning in terms of entanglement consumption in an extended quantum-state-merging protocol. We further relate the asymmetry of quantum discord with the performance imbalance in quantum state merging and dense coding.
Quantum discord quantifies nonclassical correlations beyond the standard classification of quantum states into entangled and unentangled. Although it has received considerable attention, it still lacks any precise interpretation in terms of some protocol in which quantum features are relevant. Here we give quantum discord its first information-theoretic operational meaning in terms of entanglement consumption in an extended quantum-state-merging protocol. We further relate the asymmetry of quantum discord with the performance imbalance in quantum state merging and dense coding.
In this brief report we revisit the concept of dissension, which was introduced as a natural extension of quantum discord for three qubit system. Here we bring in new expression for quantum dissensions and more interestingly we name one such expression as \textit{residual correlation}. The basic objective behind the introduction of such a quantity is to capture the extra amount of correlation generated by doing measurement in a correlated system from a situation where we do not bring in a correlated system in the measurement process. Apart from this we also present an operational interpretation of this correlation in context of state merging. Remarkably, we find that for three qubit system if one discards relevant prior information, the change in the cost of state merging ( merging the quantum information of two parties into one) is captured by the \textit{residual correlation}. In addition to that we found that this quantity can be negative for mixed states. This indeed opens up a new dimension in the tripartite scenario where we can observe situations where there is a decrease in the cost of state merging on discarding relevant prior information. We claim that this result establishes a re conceptualization of information processing tasks in tripartite situations where we can use suitable measurement and states to bring down the cost of the protocol.
Multipartite quantum systems show properties which do not admit a classical explanation. In particular, even nonentangled states can enjoy a kind of quantum correlations called quantum discord. I discuss some recent results on the role of quantum discord in metrology. Given an interferometric phase estimation protocol where the Hamiltonian is initially unknown to the experimentalist, the quantum discord of the probe state quantifies the minimum precision of the estimation. This provides a physical interpretation to a widely investigated information-theoretic quantity.