A Comparison of the Attempts of Quantum Discord and Quantum Entanglement to Capture Quantum Correlations

Abstract: Measurements of Quantum Systems disturb their states. To quantify this non-classical characteristic, Zurek and Ollivier introduced the quantum discord, a quantum correlation which can be nonzero even when entanglement in the system is zero. Discord has aroused great interest as a resource that is more robust against the effects of decoherence and offers exponential speed up of certain computational algorithms. Here, we study general two-level bipartite systems and give general results on the relationship between discord, entanglement, and linear entropy, and identify the states for which discord takes a maximal value for a given entropy or entanglement, thus placing strong bounds on entanglement-discord and entropy-discord relations. We find out that although discord and entanglement are identical for pure states, they differ when generalized to mixed states as a result of the difference in the method of generalization.