We address the experimental determination of entropic quantum discord for systems made of a pair of polarization qubits. We compare results from full and partial tomography and found that the two determinations are statistically compatible, with partial tomography leading to a smaller value of discord for depolarized states. Despite the fact that our states are well described, in terms of fidelity, by families of depolarized or phase-damped states, their entropic discord may be largely different from that predicted for these classes of states, such that no reliable estimation procedure beyond tomography may be effectively implemented. Our results, together with the lack of an analytic formula for the entropic discord of a generic two-qubit state, demonstrate that the estimation of quantum discord is an intrinsically noisy procedure. Besides, we question the use of fidelity as a figure of merit to assess quantum correlations.
We address the experimental determination of entropic quantum discord for systems made of a pair of polarization qubits. We compare results from full and partial tomography and found that the two determinations are statistically compatible, with partial tomography leading to a smaller value of discord for depolarized states. Despite the fact that our states are well described, in terms of fidelity, by families of depolarized or phase-damped states, their entropic discord may be largely different from that predicted for these classes of states, such that no reliable estimation procedure beyond tomography may be effectively implemented. Our results, together with the lack of an analytic formula for the entropic discord of a generic two-qubit state, demonstrate that the estimation of quantum discord is an intrinsically noisy procedure. Besides, we question the use of fidelity as a figure of merit to assess quantum correlations.
Quantum discord, a kind of quantum correlation, is defined as the difference between quantum mutual information and classical correlation in a bipartite system. It has been discussed so far for small systems with only a few independent parameters. We extend here to a much broader class of states when the second party is of arbitrary dimension d, so long as the first, measured, party is a qubit. We present two formulae to calculate quantum discord, the first relating to the original entropic definition and the second to a recently proposed geometric distance measure which leads to an analytical formulation. The tracing over the qubit in the entropic calculation is reduced to a very simple prescription. And, when the d-dimensional system is a so-called X state, the density matrix having non-zero elements only along the diagonal and anti-diagonal so as to appear visually like the letter X, the entropic calculation can be carried out analytically. Such states of the full bipartite qubit-qudit system may be named "extended X states", whose density matrix is built of four block matrices, each visually appearing as an X. The optimization involved in the entropic calculation is generally over two parameters, reducing to one for many cases, and avoided altogether for an overwhelmingly large set of density matrices as our numerical investigations demonstrate. Our results also apply to states of a N-qubit system, where "extended X states" consist of (2^(N+2) - 1) states, larger in number than the (2^(N+1) - 1) of X states of N qubits. While these are still smaller than the total number (2^(2N) - 1) of states of N qubits, the number of parameters involved is nevertheless large. In the case of N = 2, they encompass the entire 15-dimensional parameter space, that is, the extended X states for N = 2 represent the full qubit-qubit system.
We perform an experimental study of quantum discord on spin-orbit modes of an intense laser beam, analogous to different X states. These modes are prepared through the incoherent superposition of different intense laser beams, encoding a two-qubit system in both polarization and the first-order Hermite-Gaussian modes [as proposed in Phys. Rev. A 103, 022411 (2021)]. We characterize these modes by using all-optical tomography and calculated entropic quantum discord. Remarkably, even for high-fidelity mode reconstruction, the computation of quantum discord showed significant deviations from theoretical expectations. Then, we proposed a simple model based on noisy measurements that showed a small degradation of the fidelity of the output modes, giving rise to the strong deviation of the discord. Our results, both experimental data and the theoretical predictions, demonstrate good agreement.
Quantum discord is a measure of nonclassical correlations in quantum systems. While the bipartite version of quantum discord is experimentally well-studied, the multipartite version has never been convincingly measured. In this study, we experimentally investigate tripartite quantum discord using an NMR quantum information processor. Building on a theoretical framework for conditional projective measurements and quantum conditional mutual information, we quantify the tripartite quantum discord and its contributions in different three-qubit states such as the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) and Werner (W) states as well as classical mixtures of biseparable Bell states, and classical mixtures of product states. The experiments employed full quantum state tomography and temporal averaging to prepare mixed states, achieving fidelities exceeding 95%. Our results confirm that quantum discord persists even in the absence of entanglement, highlighting its utility as a broader indicator of quantum correlations. Furthermore, we validate the nonconvexity of discord, confirming that classical mixtures of zero-discord states can exhibit nonzero discord. This experimentally confirms that quantum discord does not fit into the framework of resource theory. This work establishes a robust methodology for measuring quantum discord, illuminating the structure and distribution of quantum correlations in multipartite systems.
Abstract Quantum discord characterizes non-classical correlations between two or more subsystems that persist even in the absence of entanglement. Unlike quantum entanglement, this measure captures more general quantum correlations, yet its estimation remains challenging due to the inherent difficulty in determining the optimal measurement orientations. In this work, we present a machine learning approach to estimate quantum discord for two-qubit systems with the help of artificial neural networks. Two distinct input strategies are investigated: one involving complete quantum state information derived from the density matrix elements and the other involving partial information derived from the expected values of measurements. Numerical simulations demonstrate that both artificial neural network architectures can predict the quantum discord of new quantum states with high precision. Our findings provide a new way to estimate quantum correlations, demonstrating the effectiveness of machine learning in quantum information tasks.
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 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 X 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 X states, whose quantum discord can be evaluated analytically without any minimization, for which their algorithm is valid, and also identify a family of X states for which their algorithm fails. And then we demonstrate that this special family of X states provides furthermore an explicit example for the inequivalence between the minimization over positive operator-valued measures and that over von Neumann measurements.