The Dual Roles of Quantum Discord in a Non-demolition Probing Task

Abstract: We present a non-demolition quantum information processing task of probing the information of a class of quantum state. In this task, the information is extracted by some unitary evolution with the introduced probing qubit assisted, but the probed quantum state (density matrix) is undisturbed at any time and independent of the choice of the initial probing state. We give a sufficient and necessary condition on the Hamiltonian that can lead to the successful realization of such a task. We prove that, for any feasible scheme, the probed plus probing system will always stay at a disentangled state with one side quantum discord absent and the other side one inevitably produced in the probing process. An explicit example is given for the demonstration, whilst the example shows that the ratio of quantum discord to the total correlation will have to reduce to zero for the maximal accessible information. In this sense, we say that quantum discord plays the dual roles in this case.