Non-Perfect Propagation of Information to a Noisy Environment with Self-Evolution.

We study the non-perfect propagation of information for evolving a low-dimensional environment that includes self-evolution as well as noisy initial states and analyse the interrelations between the degree of objectivization and environment parameters. In particular, we consider an analytical model of three interacting qubits and derive its objectivity parameters. The numerical analysis shows that the quality of the spectrum broadcast structure formed during the interaction may exhibit non-monotonicity both in the speed of self-dynamics of the environment as well as its mixedness. The former effect is particularly strong, showing that-considering part of the environment as a measurement apparatus-an increase of the external magnetic field acting on the environment may turn the vague measurement into close to ideal. The above effects suggest that quantum objectivity may appear after increasing the dynamics of the environment, although not with respect to the pointer basis, but some other, which we call the generalized pointer or indicator basis. Furthermore, it seems also that, when the objectivity is poor, it may be improved, at least by some amount, by increasing the thermal noise. We provide further evidence of this by analysing the upper bounds on distance to the set of states representing perfect objectivity in the case of a higher number of qubits.

Activating Hidden Metrological Usefulness.

We consider bipartite entangled states that cannot outperform separable states in any linear interferometer. Then, we show that these states can still be more useful metrologically than separable states if several copies of the state are provided or an ancilla is added to the quantum system. We present a general method to find the local Hamiltonian for which a given quantum state performs the best compared to separable states. We obtain analytically the optimal Hamiltonian for some quantum states with a high symmetry. We show that all bipartite entangled pure states outperform separable states in metrology. Some potential applications of the results are also suggested.

Can communication power of separable correlations exceed that of entanglement resource?

The scenario of remote state preparation with a shared correlated quantum state and one bit of forward communication [B. Dakic et al., Nat. Phys. 8, 666 (2012)] is considered. Optimization of the transmission efficiency is extended to include general encoding and decoding strategies. The importance of the use of linear fidelity is recognized. It is shown that separable states cannot exceed the efficiency of entangled states by means of "local operations plus classical communication" actions limited to 1 bit of forward communication. It is proven however that such a surprising phenomena may naturally occur when the decoding agent has limited resources in the sense that either (i) has to use decoding which is insensitive to the change of the coordinate system in the plane in question (which is the natural choice if the receiver does not know the latter) or (ii) is forced to use bistochastic operations which may be imposed by physically inconvenient local thermodynamical conditions.

No-local-broadcasting theorem for multipartite quantum correlations.

We prove that the correlations present in a multipartite quantum state have an operational quantum character even if the state is unentangled, as long as it does not simply encode a multipartite classical probability distribution. Said quantumness is revealed by the new task of local broadcasting, i.e., of locally sharing preestablished correlations, which is feasible if and only if correlations are stricly classical. Our operational approach leads to natural definitions of measures for quantumness of correlations. It also reproduces the standard no-broadcasting theorem as a special case.

Irreversibility for all bound entangled states.

We derive a new inequality for entanglement for a mixed four-partite state. Employing this inequality, we present a one-shot lower bound for entanglement cost and prove that entanglement cost is strictly larger than zero for any entangled state. We demonstrate that irreversibility occurs in the process of formation for all nondistillable entangled states. In this way we solve a long standing problem of how "real" is entanglement of bound entangled states. Using the new inequality we also prove the impossibility of local cloning of a known entangled state.

Local information as a resource in distributed quantum systems.

A new paradigm for distributed quantum systems where information is a valuable resource is developed. After finding a unique measure for information, we construct a scheme for its manipulation in analogy with entanglement theory. In this scheme, instead of maximally entangled states, two parties distill local states. We show that, surprisingly, the main tools of entanglement theory are general enough to work in this opposite scheme. Up to plausible assumptions, we show that the amount of information that must be lost during the protocol of concentration of local information can be expressed as the relative entropy distance from some special set of states.

Are there phase transitions in information space?

The interplay between two basic quantities--quantum communication and information--is investigated. Quantum communication is an important resource for quantum states shared by two parties and is directly related to entanglement. Recently, the amount of local information that can be drawn from a state has been shown to be closely related to the nonlocal properties of the state. Here we consider both formation and extraction processes, and analyze informational resources as a function of quantum communication. The resulting diagrams in information space allow us to observe phaselike transitions when correlations become classical.

Are the laws of entanglement theory thermodynamical?

We argue that on its face, entanglement theory satisfies laws equivalent to thermodynamics if the theory can be made reversible by adding certain bound entangled states as a free resource during entanglement manipulation. Subject to plausible conjectures, we prove that this is not the case in general, and discuss the implications of this for the thermodynamics of entanglement.

Thermodynamical approach to quantifying quantum correlations.

We consider the amount of work which can be extracted from a heat bath using a bipartite state rho shared by two parties. In general it is less then the amount of work extractable when one party is in possession of the entire state. We derive bounds for this "work deficit" and calculate it explicitly for a number of different cases. In particuar, for pure states the work deficit is exactly equal to the distillable entanglement of the state. A form of complementarity exists between physical work which can be extracted and distillable entanglement. The work deficit is a good measure of the quantum correlations in a state and provides a new paradigm for understanding quantum nonlocality.