Quantum mutual information and quantumness vectors for multiqubit systems

Abstract

We introduce a new information theoretic measure of quantum correlations for multiparticle systems. We use a form of multivariate mutual information—the interaction information—and generalize it to multiparticle quantum systems. There are a number of different possible generalizations. We consider two of them. One of them is related to the notion of quantum discord and the other to the concept of quantum dissension. This new measure, called dissension vector, is a set of numbers—quantumness vector. This can be thought of as a fine-grained measure, as opposed to measures that quantify some average quantum properties of a system. These quantities quantify/characterize the correlations present in multiparticle states. We consider some multiqubit states and find that these quantities are responsive to different aspects of quantumness and correlations present in a state. We find that different dissension vectors can track the correlations (both classical and quantum) or quantumness only. As physical applications, we find that these vectors might be useful in several information processing tasks. We consider the role of dissension vectors—(a) in deciding the security of BB84 protocol against an eavesdropper and (b) in determining the possible role of correlations in the performance of Grover search algorithm. Specially, in the Grover search algorithm, we find that dissension vectors can detect the correlations and show the maximum correlations when one expects.