Quantum discord, local operations, and Maxwell’s demons

Abstract

Quantum discord was proposed as a measure of the quantumness of correlations. There are at least three different discordlike quantities, two of which determine the difference between the efficiencies of a Szilard's engine under different sets of restrictions. The three discord measures vanish simultaneously. We introduce an easy way to test for zero discord, relate it to the Cerf-Adami conditional entropy and show that there is no simple relation between the discord and the local distinguishability.