Entanglement as minimal discord over state extensions

Abstract

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.