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arXiv:1208.5605 · Physical Review Letters

Discording Power of Quantum Evolutions

Fernando Galve, Francesco Plastina, Matteo G. A. Paris, Roberta Zambrini

Published Jan 2, 2013• 26 citations
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Abstract

We introduce the discording power of a unitary transformation, which assesses its capability to produce quantum discord, and analyze in detail the generation of discord by relevant classes of two-qubit gates. Our measure is based on the Cartan decomposition of two-qubit unitaries and on evaluating the maximum discord achievable by a unitary upon acting on classical-classical states at fixed purity. We find that there exist gates which are perfect discorders for any value of purity μ, and that they belong to a class of operators that includes the sqrt[SWAP]. Other gates, even those universal for quantum computation, do not possess the same property: the CNOT, for example, is a perfect discorder only for states with low or unit purity, but not for intermediate values. The discording power of a two-qubit unitary also provides a generalization of the corresponding measure defined for entanglement to any value of the purity.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.110.010501

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We introduce the discording power of a unitary transformation, which assesses its capability to produce quantum discord, and analyze in detail the generation of discord by relevant classes of two-qubit gates. Our measure is based on the Cartan decomposition of two-qubit unitaries and on evaluating the maximum discord achievable by a unitary upon acting on classical-classical states at fixed purity. We find that there exist gates which are perfect discorders for any value of purity μ, and that they belong to a class of operators that includes the sqrt[SWAP]. Other gates, even those universal for quantum computation, do not possess the same property: the CNOT, for example, is a perfect discorder only for states with low or unit purity, but not for intermediate values. The discording power of a two-qubit unitary also provides a generalization of the corresponding measure defined for entanglement to any value of the purity.
Fernando Galve \emph{et al.} [Phys.Rev.Lett.110,010501(2013)][Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{110}, 010501 (2013)][Phys.Rev.Lett.110,010501(2013)] introduced discording power for a two-qubit unitary gate to evaluate its capability to produce quantum discord, and found that a π/8π/8π/8 gate has maximal discording power. This work analyzes the entangling power of a two-qubit unitary gate, which reflects its ability to generate quantum entanglement in another way. Based on the renowned Cartan decomposition of two-qubit unitary gates, we show that the magic power of the π/8π/8π/8 gate produces maximal entanglement for a general value of purities for two-qubit states.
The ability to reach a maximally entangled state from a separable one through the use of a two-qubit unitary operator is analyzed for mixed states. This extension from the known case of pure states shows that there are at least two families of gates which are able to give maximum entangling power for all values of purity. It is notable that one of this gates coincides with a maximum discording one. We give analytical proof that such gate is indeed a perfect entangler at all purities and give numerical evidence for the existence of the second one. Furthermore, we find that there are other gates, many in fact, which are perfect entanglers for a restricted range of purities. This highlights the fact that many perfect entangler gates could in principle be found if a thorough analysis of the full parameter space is performed.
Applying controlled unitary gates to generate entanglement between qubits is a routine task in both quantum communication and computation. The existing tools for predicting how much entanglement a given gate can generate require either simulation of the entangling circuit or averaging over a distribution of inputs for a given controlled unitary gate. Here, we introduce a computable quantity ζζζ that not only determines whether a controlled unitary gate generates entanglement, but also quantifies the entanglement for any specific input without requiring the construction of the output state. For two-qubit controlled unitary gates, we establish the physical conditions corresponding to the extremum values of the proposed quantity. Extending the dimension of control and target registers to arbitrary size through a generalized controlled unitary architecture, we derive a universal upper bound on ζζζ and identify the conditions for its saturation. Later we establish functional relation between the quantity and other known quantities, such as purity, normalized linear entropy, and von Neumann entropy. Finally, we compare our results with previous research work and show that the quantity proposed in this work achieves the previously known optimal values of entangling power of controlled unitary gates for some specific dimensions of target and control registers.
Unitary invariant discord as a measure of bipartite quantum correlations in an NNN-qubit quantum system
We introduce a measure of quantum correlations in the NNN-qubit quantum system which is invariant with respect to the SU(2N)SU(2^N)SU(2N) group of transformations of this system. This measure is a modification of the quantum discord introduced earlier and is referred to as the unitary or SU(2N)SU(2^N)SU(2N)-invariant discord. Since the evolution of a quantum system is equivalent to the proper unitary transformation, the introduced measure is an integral of motion and is completely defined by eigenvalues of the density matrix. As far as the calculation of the unitary invariant discord is rather complicated computational problem, we propose its modification which may be found in a simpler way. The case N=2 is considered in details. In particular, it is shown that the modified SU(4)-invariant discord reaches the maximum value for a pure state. {A geometric measure of the unitary invariant discord of an NNN-qubit state is introduced and a simple formula for this measure is derived, which allows one to consider this measure as a witness of quantum correlations.} The relation of the unitary invariant discord with the quantum state transfer along the spin chain is considered. We also compare the modified SU(4)-invariant discord with the geometric measure of SU(4)-invariant discord of the two-qubit systems in the thermal equilibrium states governed by the different Hamiltonians.
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 provides a measure for quantifying quantum correlations beyond entanglement and is very hard to compute even for two-qubit states because of the minimization over all possible measurements. Recently a simple algorithm to evaluate the quantum discord for two-qubit XXX states was proposed by Ali, Rau, and Alber [Phys. Rev. A 81, 042105 (2010)] with minimization taken over only a few cases. Here we shall at first identify a class of XXX states, whose quantum discord can be evaluated analytically without any minimization, for which their algorithm is valid, and also identify a family of XXX states for which their algorithm fails. And then we demonstrate that this special family of XXX states provides furthermore an explicit example for the inequivalence between the minimization over positive operator-valued measures and that over von Neumann measurements.