Role of complementary correlations in the evolution of classical and quantum correlations under Markovian decoherence

Abstract

Quantum correlation lies at the very heart of almost all of the non-classical phenomena exhibited by quantum systems composed of two or more subsystems. In recent times it has been pointed out that there is a kind of quantum correlation, namely discord, which is more general than entanglement. Some authors have investigated the phenomenon that for certain initial states the quantum correlations as well as the classical correlations exhibit sudden change under simple Markovian noise. We show that this dynamical behavior of the correlations of both types can be explained using the idea of complementary correlations. We also show that though a certain class of mixed entangled states can resist the monotonic decay of quantum correlations, this is not true for all mixed states. Moreover, pure entangled states of two qubits will never exhibit such sudden change.