Sudden decoherence transitions for quantum discord

Abstract

We investigate the disappearance of discord in 2- and multi-qubit systems subject to decohering influences. We formulate the computation of quantum discord and quantum geometric discord in terms of the generalized Bloch vector, which gives useful insights on the time evolution of quantum coherence for the open system, particularly the comparison of entanglement and discord. We show that the analytical calculation of the global geometric discord is NP-hard in the number of qubits, but a similar statement for global entropic discord is more difficult to prove. We present an efficient numerical method to calculating the quantum discord for a certain important class of multipartite states. In agreement with previous work for 2-qubit cases (Mazzola et al 2010 Phys. Rev. Lett. 104 200401), we find situations in which there is a sudden transition from classical to quantum decoherence characterized by the discord remaining relatively robust (classical decoherence) until a certain point from where it begins to decay quickly whereas the classical correlation decays more slowly (quantum decoherence). However, we find that as the number of qubits increases, the chance of this kind of transition occurring becomes small.