Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics Europe & European Quantum Electronics Conference (CLEO/Europe-EQEC)
Operational significance of discord consumption
Thomas Symul, Helen M. Chrzanowski, Syed M. Assad, Ping Koy Lam, Timothy C. Ralph, Mile Gu, Kavan Kishore Modi, Vlatko Vedral
Abstract
For many years, the notion of quantum correlations was equated with the notion of quantum entanglement. The wide range of quantum protocols whose extra-powers over classical protocol were shown to originate from quantum entanglement mostly motivated this. For example, it was shown that for certain class of problems, a quantum computer could provide exponential speed-up over its classical counterpart, given that it relied on quantum entangled resources. Recently, however, the requirement of possessing entanglement to perform efficient quantum computation has been questioned both theoretically [1] and experimentally [2]. It appears that a non-classical quantity called quantum discord [3] is all that is required.