Quantum correlations in the collective spin systems

Quantum and classical pairwise correlations in two typical collective spin systems (i.e., the Dicke model and the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model) are discussed. These correlations in the thermodynamical limit are obtained analytically and in a finite-size system are calculated numerically. Large-size scaling behavior for the quantum discord itself is observed, which has never been reported in another critical system. A logarithmic diverging behavior for the first derivative of the quantum discord is also found in both models, which might be universal in the second-order quantum phase transition. It is suggested that the pronounced maximum or minimum of first derivative of quantum discord signifies the critical point. Comparisons between the quantum discord and the scaled concurrence are performed. It is shown that the quantum discord is very small in one phase and robust in the other phase, while the scaled concurrence shows maximum at the critical point and decays rapidly when away from the the critical point.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figure

Quantum correlations in a cluster-like system

We discuss a cluster-like 1D system with triplet interaction. We study the topological properties of this system. We find that the degeneracy depends on the topology of the system, and well protected against external local perturbations. All these facts show that the system is topologically ordered. We also find a string order parameter to characterize the quantum phase transition. Besides, we investigate two-site correlations including entanglement, quantum discord and mutual information. We study the different divergency behaviour of the correlations. The quantum correlation decays exponentially in both topological and magnetic phases, and diverges in reversed power law at the critical point. And we find that in TQPT systems, the global difference of topology induced by dimension can be reflected in local quantum correlations.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure

Quantum correlations in topological quantum phase transitions

We study the quantum correlations in a 2D system that possesses a topological quantum phase transition. The quantumness of two-body correlations is measured by quantum discord. We calculate both the correlation of two local spins and that of an arbitrary spin with the rest of the lattice. It is notable that local spins are classically correlated, while the quantum correlation is hidden in the global lattice. This is different from other systems which are not topologically orderd. Moreover, the mutual information and global quantum discord show critical behavior in the topological quantum phase transition.Comment: 6 pages, 3 figure

Topological order in 1D Cluster state protected by symmetry

We demonstrate how to construct the Z2*Z2 global symmetry which protects the ground state degeneracy of cluster states for open boundary conditions. Such a degeneracy ultimately arises because the set of stabilizers do not span a complete set of integrals of motion of the cluster state Hamiltonian for open boundary conditions. By applying control phase transformations, our construction makes the stabilizers into the Pauli operators spanning the qubit Hilbert space from which the degeneracy comes.Comment: 1 figure, To be published in Quantum Information Processin

Entanglement in spin-1/2 dimerized Heisenberg systems

We study entanglement in dimerized Heisenberg systems. In particular, we give exact results of ground-state pairwise entanglement for the four-qubit model by identifying a Z_2 symmetry. Although the entanglements cannot identify the critical point of the system, the mean entanglement of nearest-neighbor qubits really does, namely, it reaches a maximum at the critical point.Comment: Four pages, three figures, accepted in Communications in Theoretical Physic

Classification of Gapped Symmetric Phases in 1D Spin Systems

Quantum many-body systems divide into a variety of phases with very different physical properties. The question of what kind of phases exist and how to identify them seems hard especially for strongly interacting systems. Here we make an attempt to answer this question for gapped interacting quantum spin systems whose ground states are short-range correlated. Based on the local unitary equivalence relation between short-range correlated states in the same phase, we classify possible quantum phases for 1D matrix product states, which represent well the class of 1D gapped ground states. We find that in the absence of any symmetry all states are equivalent to trivial product states, which means that there is no topological order in 1D. However, if certain symmetry is required, many phases exist with different symmetry protected topological orders. The symmetric local unitary equivalence relation also allows us to obtain some simple results for quantum phases in higher dimensions when some symmetries are present.Comment: 21 pages, 7 figures. Version 2, classification for parity and translation symmetry update

Entanglement and Quantum Phase Transition in Low Dimensional Spin Systems

Entanglement of the ground states in $XXZ$ and dimerized Heisenberg spin chains as well as in a two-leg spin ladder is analyzed by using the spin-spin concurrence and the entanglement entropy between a selected sublattice of spins and the rest of the system. In particular, we reveal that quantum phase transition points/boundaries may be identified based on the analysis on the local extreme of this entanglement entropy, which is illustrated to be superior over the concurrence scenario and may enable us to explore quantum phase transitions in many other systems including higher dimensional ones.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure

Peierls distorted chain as a quantum data bus for quantum state transfer

We systematically study the transfer of quantum state of electron spin as the flying qubit along a half-filled Peierls distorted tight-binding chain described by the Su-Schrieffer-Heeger (SSH) model, which behaves as a quantum data bus. This enables a novel physical mechanism for quantum communication with always-on interaction: the effective hopping of the spin carrier between sites $A$ and $B$ connected to two sites in this SSH chain can be induced by the quasi-excitations of the SSH model. As we prove, it is the Peierls energy gap of the SSH quasi-excitations that plays a crucial role to protect the robustness of the quantum state transfer process. Moreover, our observation also indicates that such a scheme can also be employed to explore the intrinsic property of the quantum system.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure

Necessary and sufficient conditions for local creation of quantum discord

We show that a local channel cannot create quantum discord (QD) for zero QD states of size $d\geq3$ if and only if either it is a completely decohering channel or it is a nontrivial isotropic channel. For the qubit case this propertiy is additionally characteristic to the completely decohering channel or the commutativity-preserving unital channel. In particular, the exact forms of the completely decohering channel and the commutativity-preserving unital qubit channel are proposed. Consequently, our results confirm and improve the conjecture proposed by X. Hu et al. for the case of $d\geq3$ and improve the result proposed by A. Streltsov et al. for the qubit case. Furthermore, it is shown that a local channel nullifies QD in any state if and only if it is a completely decohering channel. Based on our results, some protocols of quantum information processing issues associated with QD, especially for the qubit case, would be experimentally accessible.Comment: 8 page

Novel cloning machine with supplementary information

Probabilistic cloning was first proposed by Duan and Guo. Then Pati established a novel cloning machine (NCM) for copying superposition of multiple clones simultaneously. In this paper, we deal with the novel cloning machine with supplementary information (NCMSI). For the case of cloning two states, we demonstrate that the optimal efficiency of the NCMSI in which the original party and the supplementary party can perform quantum communication equals that achieved by a two-step cloning protocol wherein classical communication is only allowed between the original and the supplementary parties. From this equivalence it follows that NCMSI may increase the success probabilities for copying. Also, an upper bound on the unambiguous discrimination of two nonorthogonal pure product states is derived. Our investigation generalizes and completes the results in the literature.Comment: 22 pages; the presentation is revised, and some typos are correcte