Operational significance of discord consumption

Abstract

For many years, the notion of quantum correlations was equated with the notion of quantum entanglement. The wide range of quantum protocols whose extra-powers over classical protocol were shown to originate from quantum entanglement mostly motivated this. For example, it was shown that for certain class of problems, a quantum computer could provide exponential speed-up over its classical counterpart, given that it relied on quantum entangled resources. Recently, however, the requirement of possessing entanglement to perform efficient quantum computation has been questioned both theoretically [1] and experimentally [2]. It appears that a non-classical quantity called quantum discord [3] is all that is required. © 2013 IEEE.