English

Operational Significance of Discord Consumption: Theory and Experiment

Quantum Physics 2012-09-19 v3

Abstract

Coherent interactions that generate negligible entanglement can still exhibit unique quantum behaviour. This observation has motivated a search beyond entanglement for a complete description of all quantum correlations. Quantum discord is a promising candidate. Here, we demonstrate that under certain measurement constraints, discord between bipartite systems can be consumed to encode information that can only be accessed by coherent quantum interactions. The inability to access this information by any other means allows us to use discord to directly quantify this `quantum advantage'. We experimentally encode information within the discordant correlations of two separable Gaussian states. The amount of extra information recovered by coherent interaction is quantified and directly linked with the discord consumed during encoding. No entanglement exists at any point of this experiment. Thus we introduce and demonstrate an operational method to use discord as a physical resource.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1203.0011,
  title  = {Operational Significance of Discord Consumption: Theory and Experiment},
  author = {Mile Gu and Helen M. Chrzanowski and Syed M. Assad and Thomas Symul and Kavan Modi and Timothy C. Ralph and Vlatko Vedral and Ping Koy Lam},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1203.0011},
  year   = {2012}
}

Comments

10 pages, 3 figures, updated with Nature Physics Reference, simplified proof in Appendix