Quantum Discord and the Quantum Advantage

Abstract

Entanglement is a paradigmatic example of quantum correlations, a presumed reason for the superior performance of quantum computation and an obvious divider of states and processes into classical and quantum. In the last decade all these notions were challenged. Entanglement does not capture the totality of non-classical behavior. Quantum discord (in its different versions) is a more general measure of quantum correlations. It can be related to the advantage in some tasks like the extraction of work from a Szilrad heat engine using Maxwell's demons with various resources. The discord turns out to be the difference between the work extracted from a given bipartite system using a a global and a local strategy. Different strategies relate to different definitions of discord, but all definitions agree on zero, so "classical" systems are universal to all heat engines. One way of identifying a task as quantum or classical is by examining the quantum resources required to implement it. This can be done by examining the entanglement required for a LOCC implementation of the task. Creation (or non-creation) of entanglement as a result of its implementation is not enough to identify these resources. An example is a bi-local implementation of an entangling quantum gate (C-NOT) by LOCC with unentagled input and output states. This lack of entanglement does not guarantee the LOCC implementability. A method to determine if entanglement resources are required is to track the change in quantum discord during the process.