Adiabatic freezing of long-range quantum correlations in spin chains

We consider a process to create quasi long-range quantum discord between the non-interacting end spins of a quantum spin chain, with the end spins weakly coupled to the bulk of the chain. The process is not only capable of creating long-range quantum correlation but the latter remains frozen, when certain weak end-couplings are adiabatically varied below certain thresholds. We term this phenomenon as adiabatic freezing of quantum correlation. We observe that the freezing is robust to moderate thermal fluctuations and is intrinsically related to the cooperative properties of the quantum spin chain. In particular, we find that the energy gap of the system remains frozen for these adiabatic variations, and moreover, considering the end spins as probes, we show that the interval of freezing can detect the anisotropy transition in quantum XY spin chains. Importantly, the adiabatic freezing of long-range quantum correlations can be simulated with contemporary experimental techniques.Comment: Main text (6 pages, 6 figures) and Supplemental material (4 pages, 4 figures), REVTeX 4-

Maximally coherent mixed states: Complementarity between maximal coherence and mixedness

Quantum coherence is a key element in topical research on quantum resource theories and a primary facilitator for design and implementation of quantum technologies. However, the resourcefulness of quantum coherence is severely restricted by environmental noise, which is indicated by the loss of information in a quantum system, measured in terms of its purity. In this work, we derive the limits imposed by the mixedness of a quantum system on the amount of quantum coherence that it can possess. We obtain an analytical trade-off between the two quantities that upperbound the maximum quantum coherence for fixed mixedness in a system. This gives rise to a class of quantum states, "maximally coherent mixed states," whose coherence cannot be increased further under any purity-preserving operation. For the above class of states, quantum coherence and mixedness satisfy a complementarity relation, which is crucial to understand the interplay between a resource and noise in open quantum systems.Comment: 8 pages, 1 figure, REVTex 4.1, close to published versio