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arXiv:1112.5066 · Physical Review Letters

Discord and Nonclassicality in Probabilistic Theories

Paolo Perinotti

Published Mar 19, 2012• 30 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Quantum discord quantifies nonclassical correlations in quantum states. We introduce discord for states in causal probabilistic theories, inspired by the original definition proposed by H. Ollivier and W. H. Zurek [Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 017901 (2001)]. We show that the only probabilistic theory in which all states have null discord is classical probability theory. Non-null discord is then not just a quantum feature, but a generic signature of nonclassicality.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.108.120502

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Quantum discord quantifies nonclassical correlations in quantum states. We introduce discord for states in causal probabilistic theories, inspired by the original definition proposed by H. Ollivier and W. H. Zurek [Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 017901 (2001)]. We show that the only probabilistic theory in which all states have null discord is classical probability theory. Non-null discord is then not just a quantum feature, but a generic signature of nonclassicality.
Quantum discord quantifies nonclassical correlations in a quantum system including those not captured by entanglement. Thus, only states with zero discord exhibit strictly classical correlations. We prove that these states are negligible in the whole Hilbert space: typically a state picked out at random has positive discord and, given a state with zero discord, a generic arbitrarily small perturbation drives it to a positive-discord state. These results hold for any Hilbert-space dimension and have direct implications for quantum computation and for the foundations of the theory of open systems. In addition, we provide a simple necessary criterion for zero quantum discord. Finally, we show that, for almost all positive-discord states, an arbitrary Markovian evolution cannot lead to a sudden, permanent vanishing of discord.
Measurements of quantum systems disturb their states. To quantify this nonclassical characteristic, Zurek and Ollivier [Phys. Rev. Lett. 88, 017901 (2001)] introduced the quantum discord, a quantum correlation that can be nonzero even when entanglement in the system is zero. Discord has aroused great interest as a resource that is more robust against the effects of decoherence and offers the exponential speed-up of certain computational algorithms. Here, we study general two-level bipartite systems and give general results on the relationship between discord, entanglement, and linear entropy. We also identify the states for which discord takes a maximal value for a given entropy or entanglement, thus placing strong bounds on entanglement-discord and entropy-discord relations. We find out that although discord and entanglement are identical for pure states, they differ when generalized to mixed states as a result of the difference in the method of generalization.
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.
We extend the definition of quantum discord as a quantifier of nonClassical correlations in a quantum state to the case where weak measurements are performed on subsystem AAA of a bipartite system ABABAB. The properties of weak discord are explored for several families of quantum states. We find that in many cases weak quantum discord is identical to normal discord and in general the values of the two are very close to each other. Weak quantum discord reduces to discord in the appropriate limits as well. We also discuss the implications of these observations on the interpretations of quantum discord.
One of the best signatures of nonclassicality in a quantum system is the existence of correlations that have no classical counterpart. Different methods for quantifying the quantum and classical parts of correlations are among the more actively studied topics of quantum-information theory over the past decade. Entanglement is the most prominent of these correlations, but in many cases unentangled states exhibit nonclassical behavior too. Thus distinguishing quantum correlations other than entanglement provides a better division between the quantum and classical worlds, especially when considering mixed states. Here different notions of classical and quantum correlations quantified by quantum discord and other related measures are reviewed. In the first half, the mathematical properties of the measures of quantum correlations are reviewed, related to each other, and the classical-quantum division that is common among them is discussed. In the second half, it is shown that the measures identify and quantify the deviation from classicality in various quantum-information-processing tasks, quantum thermodynamics, open-system dynamics, and many-body physics. It is shown that in many cases quantum correlations indicate an advantage of quantum methods over classical ones.
A generalization of quantum discord to multipartite systems is proposed. A key feature of our formulation is its consistency with the conventional definition of discord in bipartite systems. It is by construction zero only for systems with classically correlated subsystems and is a non-negative quantity, giving a measure of the total nonclassical correlations in the multipartite system with respect to a fixed measurement ordering. For the tripartite case, we show that the discord can be decomposed into contributions resulting from changes induced by nonclassical correlation breaking measurements in the conditional mutual information and tripartite mutual information. The former gives a measure of the bipartite nonclassical correlations and is a non-negative quantity, while the latter is related to the monogamy of the nonclassical correlations.