We provide a historical perspective of how the notion of correlations has evolved within quantum physics. We begin by reviewing Shannon's information theory and its first application in quantum physics, due to Everett, in explaining the information conveyed during a quantum measurement. This naturally leads us to Lindblad's information theoretic analysis of quantum measurements and his emphasis of the difference between the classical and quantum mutual information. After briefly summarizing the quantification of entanglement using these ideas, we arrive at the concept of quantum discord, which naturally captures the boundary between entanglement and classical correlations. Finally we discuss possible links between discord, which the generation of correlations in thermodynamic transformations of coupled harmonic oscillators.
We provide a historical perspective of how the notion of correlations has evolved within quantum physics. We begin by reviewing Shannon's information theory and its first application in quantum physics, due to Everett, in explaining the information conveyed during a quantum measurement. This naturally leads us to Lindblad's information theoretic analysis of quantum measurements and his emphasis of the difference between the classical and quantum mutual information. After briefly summarizing the quantification of entanglement using these ideas, we arrive at the concept of quantum discord, which naturally captures the boundary between entanglement and classical correlations. Finally we discuss possible links between discord, which the generation of correlations in thermodynamic transformations of coupled harmonic oscillators.
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.
In this didactic article we explore the concept of quantum correlations beyond entanglement. We begin by introducing and motivating the classically correlated states and then showing how to quantify the quantum correlations using an entropic approach, arriving at a well known measure called the quantum discord. Quantum correlations and discord are then operationally linked with the task of local broadcasting. We conclude by providing some alternative perspectives on quantum correlations and how to measure them.
Recent measures of nonclassical correlations are motivated by different notions of classicality and operational means. Quantum discord has received a great deal of attention in studies involving quantum computation, metrology, dynamics, many-body physics, and thermodynamics. In this article I show how quantum discord is different from quantum entanglement from a pedagogical point of view. I begin with a pedagogical introduction to quantum entanglement and quantum discord, followed by a historical review of quantum discord. Next, I give a novel definition of quantum discord in terms of any classically extractable information, an approach that is fitting for the current avenues of research. Lastly, I put forth several arguments for why discord is an interesting quantity to study and why it is of interest to so many researchers in the community.
The characterization and quantification of quantum correlations, which play an instrumental role in exploring and exploiting the quantum world, have been extensively and intensively studied in the past few decades. Of special prominence and significance are the concepts of entanglement and discord, which are usually regarded as very distinctive quantum correlations, with the latter going beyond the former. In this work we establish a direct and natural link between entanglement and discord via state extensions and reveal that entanglement is actually the intrinsic discord, by which we mean that entanglement is the irreducible residue of discord viewed from ambient spaces. Our approach, taking into account the contextuality of a quantum state and being of a global nature, stands in sharp contrast to the local operations and classical communication paradigm of entanglement, which focuses on the state itself via a local approach. Furthermore, we introduce a figure of merit which, on the one hand, captures the essence of entanglement, i.e., nonlocality and quantumness of correlations, and, on the other hand, leads to a quantitative decomposition of total correlations into classical correlations, dissonance, and entanglement. This demystifies the meaning of entanglement from the perspective of quantum measurements and provides a unified framework for the interplay of various correlations in terms of quantum measurements and mutual information.
A survey of recent ideas and goals, along with a brief history behind the quantification of uncertainties and statistical correlation in quantum systems is presented. The focus is on ideas and connections taken from information theory, in particular, the quantification of uncertainties via Shannon entropies, the entropic uncertainty relation, and statistical correlation by mutual information. A discussion of phase-space distributions and their use in information theory is also given. An incomplete list of applications, with emphasis on confined quantum systems, is provided. The article concludes by addressing future challenges in these directions.
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.