Quantum correlation beyond entanglement: Holographic discord and multipartite generalizations (2506.02131v1)

Abstract: While entanglement is a cornerstone of quantum theory and holography, quantum correlations arising from superposition, such as quantum discord, offer a broader perspective that has remained largely unexplored in holography. We construct gravity duals of quantum discord and classical correlation. In both holographic systems and Haar random states, discord exceeds entanglement, revealing an additional quantum correlation linked to the Markov gap and non-distillable entanglement, suggesting holographic states are intrinsically non-bipartite. In black hole setups, discord can increase despite decoherence and persists beyond the sudden death of distillable entanglement. Motivated by the holographic formula, we define reflected discord -- an optimization-free boundary quantity based on reflected entropy -- which remains effective even outside the holographic regime. We also propose several multipartite generalizations of discord, including a holography-inspired one based on multi-entropy. These results provide new tools for quantifying quantum correlations beyond entanglement in strongly coupled many-body systems and offer a novel approach to multipartite correlation measures.