The classification and quantification of correlations (classical and quantum) in composite quantum systems are of fundamental significance for quantum information processing. While the paradigm of separability versus entanglement has been intensively studied, the scenario of classicality versus quantumness, with focus on the quantum discord, has also attracted many recent interests. In this paper, pursuing further the latter scenario and exploiting the intrinsic structure of bipartite quantum states via local projective measurements, we introduce the notion of coherent dimension of correlations in terms of the Lüders measurements. The coherent dimension can alternatively be regarded as a generalization of the Schmidt number of a pure state. Furthermore, we propose some families of measures for correlations, which extend naturally both the quantum discord and the quantum mutual information (total correlations), and furthermore interpolate between them. These quantities reveal some hierarchial structures, and provide a more complete description, of both classical and quantum correlations in the quantum realm.
The classification and quantification of correlations (classical and quantum) in composite quantum systems are of fundamental significance for quantum information processing. While the paradigm of separability versus entanglement has been intensively studied, the scenario of classicality versus quantumness, with focus on the quantum discord, has also attracted many recent interests. In this paper, pursuing further the latter scenario and exploiting the intrinsic structure of bipartite quantum states via local projective measurements, we introduce the notion of coherent dimension of correlations in terms of the Lüders measurements. The coherent dimension can alternatively be regarded as a generalization of the Schmidt number of a pure state. Furthermore, we propose some families of measures for correlations, which extend naturally both the quantum discord and the quantum mutual information (total correlations), and furthermore interpolate between them. These quantities reveal some hierarchial structures, and provide a more complete description, of both classical and quantum correlations in the quantum realm.
In quantum mechanics, quantum coherence of a state relative to a quantum measurement can be identified with the quantumness that has to be destroyed by the measurement. In particular, quantum coherence of a bipartite state relative to a local quantum measurement encodes quantum correlations in the state. If one takes minimization with respect to the local measurements, then one is led to quantifiers which capture quantum correlations from the perspective of coherence. In this vein, quantum discord, which quantifies the minimal correlations that have to be destroyed by quantum measurements, can be identified as the minimal coherence, with the coherence measured by the relative entropy of coherence. To advocate and formulate this idea in a general context, we first review coherence relative to Lüders measurements which extends the notion of coherence relative to von Neumann measurements (or equivalently, orthonomal bases), and highlight the observation that quantum discord arises as minimal coherence through two prototypical examples. Then, we introduce some novel measures of quantum correlations in terms of coherence, illustrate them through examples, investigate their fundamental properties and implications, and indicate their applications to quantum metrology.
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.
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.
The total correlation in a bipartite quantum system is measured by the quantum mutual information I, which consists of quantum discord and classical correlation. However, recent results in quantum information show that coherence, which is a part of total correlation, is more general and more fundamental. The role of coherence in quantum resource theory is worthwhile to investigate. We first study the relationship between quantum discord and coherence by decreasing the difference between them. Then, we consider the dynamics of quantum discord, classical correlation, and quantum coherence under incoherent quantum channels. It is found that coherence indicates the behavior of quantum discord (classical correlation) for times t<t, and indicates the behavior of classical correlation (quantum discord) for times t>t. Moreover, the coherence freeze and decay characterize the quantum discord and classical correlation freeze and decay, respectively.
Quantum discord, a kind of quantum correlation, is defined as the difference between quantum mutual information and classical correlation in a bipartite system. In general, this correlation is different from entanglement, and quantum discord may be nonzero even for certain separable states. Even in the simple case of bipartite quantum systems, this different kind of quantum correlation has interesting and significant applications in quantum information processing. So far, quantum discord has been calculated explicitly only for a rather limited set of two-qubit quantum states and expressions for more general quantum states are not known. In this article, we derive explicit expressions for quantum discord for a larger class of two-qubit states, namely, a seven-parameter family of so called X states that have been of interest in a variety of contexts in the field. We also study the relation between quantum discord, classical correlation, and entanglement for a number of two-qubit states to demonstrate that they are independent measures of correlation with no simple relative ordering between them.
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.