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arXiv:quant-ph/0112074 · Physical Review Letters

Thermodynamical Approach to Quantifying Quantum Correlations

Jonathan Oppenheim, Michał Horodecki, Paweł Horodecki, Ryszard Horodecki

Published Oct 11, 2002• 541 citations
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Abstract

We consider the amount of work which can be extracted from a heat bath using a bipartite state rho shared by two parties. In general it is less then the amount of work extractable when one party is in possession of the entire state. We derive bounds for this "work deficit" and calculate it explicitly for a number of different cases. In particuar, for pure states the work deficit is exactly equal to the distillable entanglement of the state. A form of complementarity exists between physical work which can be extracted and distillable entanglement. The work deficit is a good measure of the quantum correlations in a state and provides a new paradigm for understanding quantum nonlocality.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.89.180402

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We consider the amount of work which can be extracted from a heat bath using a bipartite state rho shared by two parties. In general it is less then the amount of work extractable when one party is in possession of the entire state. We derive bounds for this "work deficit" and calculate it explicitly for a number of different cases. In particuar, for pure states the work deficit is exactly equal to the distillable entanglement of the state. A form of complementarity exists between physical work which can be extracted and distillable entanglement. The work deficit is a good measure of the quantum correlations in a state and provides a new paradigm for understanding quantum nonlocality.
We consider the amount of work which can be extracted from a heat bath using a bipartite state rho\\rhorho shared by two parties. In general it is less then the amount of work extractable when one party is in possession of the entire state. We derive bounds for this "work deficit" and calculate it explicitly for a number of different cases. For pure states and maximally correlated states the work deficit is exactly equal to the distillable entanglement of the state. In these cases a form of complementarity exists between physical work which can be extracted and distillable entanglement. The work deficit is a good measure of the quantum correlations in a state and provides a new paradigm for understanding quantum non-locality.
Recently Horodecki et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 90, 100402 (2003)] introduced an important quantum information processing paradigm in which two parties sharing many copies of the same bipartite quantum state distill local pure states by means of local unitary operations assisted by a one-way (two-way) completely dephasing channel. Local pure states are a valuable resource from a thermodynamical point of view since they allow thermal energy to be converted into work by local quantum heat engines. The work deficit was defined as the decrease in the work extractable from the joint system due to this process of localization, and was proposed as a measure of the quantumness of correlations. We give a simple information theoretical characterization of the one-way work deficit, which turns out to be complementary to a previously known operational measure of classical correlations, the one-way distillable common randomness
We study the process of assisted work distillation. This scenario arises when two parties share a bipartite quantum state ρ_{AB} and their task is to locally distill the optimal amount of work when one party is restricted to thermal operations, whereas the other can perform general quantum operations and they are allowed to communicate classically. We demonstrate that this question is intimately related to the distillation of classical and quantum correlations. In particular, we show that the advantage of one party performing global measurements over many copies of ρ_{AB} is related to the nonadditivity of the entanglement of formation. We also show that there may exist work bound in the quantum correlations of the state that is only extractable under the wider class of local Gibbs-preserving operations.
In spite of many results in quantum information theory, the complex nature of compound systems is far from clear. In general the information is a mixture of local and nonlocal (``quantum'') information. It is important from both pragmatic and theoretical points of view to know the relationships between the two components. To make this point more clear, we develop and investigate the quantum-information processing paradigm in which parties sharing a multipartite state distill local information. The amount of information which is lost because the parties must use a classical communication channel is the deficit. This scheme can be viewed as complementary to the notion of distilling entanglement. After reviewing the paradigm in detail, we show that the upper bound for the deficit is given by the relative entropy distance to so-called pseudoclassically correlated states; the lower bound is the relative entropy of entanglement. This implies, in particular, that any entangled state is informationally nonlocal---i.e., has nonzero deficit. We also apply the paradigm to defining the thermodynamical cost of erasing entanglement. We show the cost is bounded from below by relative entropy of entanglement. We demonstrate the existence of several other nonlocal phenomena which can be found using the paradigm of local information. For example, we prove the existence of a form of nonlocality without entanglement and with distinguishability. We analyze the deficit for several classes of multipartite pure states and obtain that in contrast to the GHZ state, the Aharonov state is extremely nonlocal. We also show that there do not exist states for which the deficit is strictly equal to the whole informational content (bound local information). We discuss the relation of the paradigm with measures of classical correlations introduced earlier. It is also proved that in the one-way scenario, the deficit is additive for Bell diagonal states. We then discuss complementary features of information in distributed quantum systems. Finally we discuss the physical and theoretical meaning of the results and pose many open questions.
While bipartite quantum correlations have been extensively studied across various fields, the role of multipartite quantum correlations in many-body systems remains elusive due to their complex structure. A primary challenge lies in the fact that the calculation of multipartite quantum correlation measure often requires an exponential cost with respect to the system size. In this work, we address this problem by adopting a thermodynamic approach: We introduce a measure of multipartite quantum correlations based on the difference in extractable thermodynamic work between global operations and LOCC (local operations and classical communication). This can be regarded as a multipartite generalization of the bipartite work deficit, which has attracted attention as a thermodynamic measure of bipartite quantum correlation. Importantly, we develop an efficient method for computing the multipartite work deficit in a special class of quantum many-body systems described by matrix product states (MPS). The numerical cost of this method scales linearly with system size, significantly reducing the exponential overhead required for direct calculations. We apply this method to an MPS family and show that a quantum phase transition is well captured by the multipartite work deficit, which exhibits singular behavior at the transition point. Our work shows that the multipartite work deficit not only highlights the fundamental connection between multipartite quantum correlations and quantum thermodynamics, but also serves as an efficiently computable probe of the structures of quantum many-body systems.
The presence of correlations among constituent quantum systems has great relevance in thermodynamics. Significant efforts have been devoted to investigate the role of correlations in work extraction, among others. Here we derive a bound on the difference between global and local extractable work by unitary operations (ergotropic gap) for bipartite separable states. Violation of this bound necessarily certifies the presence of entanglement. This gap is shown to be a monotone under local operations and classical communication-assisted state transformations for pure bipartite quantum states. Further, we provide a thermo-majorization criterion that is sufficient to compare the single-shot work deficit between two pure bipartite entangled states. The ergotropic gap has an implication in witnessing the dimension of a bipartite quantum state with the same local dimensions. On the other hand, our result gives an operational meaning to the Nielsen-Kempe disorder criterion. We also propose a schematic model to visualize the separability bound and to detect entanglement for a restricted class of quantum states.