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Signatures of chaos can be understood by studying quantum systems whose classical counterpart is chaotic. However, the concepts of integrability, non-integrability and chaos extend to systems without a classical analogue. Here, we first review the classical route from order into chaos. Since nature is fundamentally quantum, we discuss how chaos manifests in the quantum domain. We briefly describe semi-classical methods, and discuss the consequences of chaos in quantum information processing. We review the quantum version of Lyapunov exponents, as quantified by the out-of-time ordered correlators (OTOC), Kolmogorov-Sinai (KS) entropy and sensitivity to errors. We then review the study of signatures of quantum chaos using quantum tomography. Classically, if we know the dynamics exactly, as we maintain a constant coarse-grained tracking of the trajectory, we gain exponentially fine-grained information about the initial condition. In the quantum setting,as we track the measurement record with fixed signal-to-noise, we gain increasing information about the initial condition. In the process, we have given a new quantification of operator spreading in Krylov subspaces with quantum state reconstruction. The study of these signatures is not only of theoretical interest but also of practical importance., Comment: 22 pages. This is a review article. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:2409.10182

When subject to a non-local unitary evolution, qubits in a quantum circuit become increasingly entangled. Conversely, measurements applied to individual qubits lead to their disentanglement from the collective system. The extent of entanglement reduction depends on the frequency of local projective measurements. A delicate balance emerges between unitary evolution, which enhances entanglement, and measurements which diminish it. In the thermodynamic limit, there is a phase transition from volume law entanglement to area law entanglement at a critical value of measurement frequency. This phenomenon, occurring in hybrid quantum circuits with both unitary gates and measurements, is termed as measurement-induced phase transition (MIPT). We study the behavior of MIPT in circuits comprising of two qubit unitary gates parameterized by Cartan decomposition. We show that the entangling power and gate typicality of the two-qubit local unitaries employed in the circuit can be used to explain the behavior of global bipartite entanglement the circuit can sustain. When the two qubit gate throughout the circuit is the identity and measurements are the sole driver of the entanglement behavior, we obtain analytical estimate for the entanglement entropy that shows remarkable agreement with numerical simulations. We also find that the entangling power and gate typicality enable the classification of the two-qubit unitaries by different universality classes of phase transitions that can occur in the hybrid circuit. For all unitaries in a particular universality class, the transition from volume to area law of entanglement occurs with same exponent that characterizes the phase transition., Comment: 14 page, 14 figures

The optimal rate at which information can be sent through a quantum channel when the transmitted signal must simultaneously carry some minimum amount of energy is characterized. To do so, we introduce the quantum-classical analogue of the capacity-power function and generalize results in classical information theory for transmitting classical information through noisy channels. We show that the capacity-power function for a classical-quantum channel, for both unassisted and private protocol, is concave and also prove additivity for unentangled and uncorrelated ensembles of input signals for such channels. This implies we do not need regularized formulas for calculation. We show these properties also hold for all noiseless channels when we restrict the set of input states to be pure quantum states. For general channels, we find that the capacity-power function is piece-wise concave. We give an elegant visual proof for this supported by numerical simulations. We connect channel capacity and properties of random quantum states. In particular, we obtain analytical expressions for the capacity-power function for the case of noiseless channels using properties of random quantum states under an energy constraint and concentration phenomena in large Hilbert spaces., Comment: 16 pages, 18 figures

We study operator spreading in many-body quantum systems by its potential to generate an informationally complete measurement record in quantum tomography. We adopt continuous weak measurement tomography for this purpose. We generate the measurement record as a series of expectation values of an observable evolving under the desired dynamics, which can show a transition from integrability to complete chaos. We find that the amount of operator spreading, as quantified by the fidelity in quantum tomography, increases with the degree of chaos in the system. We also observe a remarkable increase in information gain when the dynamics transitions from integrable to nonintegrable. We find our approach in quantifying operator spreading is a more consistent indicator of quantum chaos than Krylov complexity as the latter may correlate/anti-correlate or show no explicit behavior with the level of chaos in the dynamics. We support our argument through various metrics of information gain for two models: the Ising spin chain with a tilted magnetic field and the Heisenberg XXZ spin chain with an integrability-breaking field. Our paper gives an operational interpretation for operator spreading in quantum chaos., Comment: 17 pages, 9 figures, updated Manuscript, accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. B

Non-KAM (Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser) systems, when perturbed by weak time-dependent fields, offer a fast route to classical chaos through an abrupt breaking of invariant phase space tori. In this work, we employ out-of-time-order correlators (OTOCs) to study the dynamical sensitivity of a perturbed non-KAM system in the quantum limit as the parameter that characterizes the $\textit{resonance}$ condition is slowly varied. For this purpose, we consider a quantized kicked harmonic oscillator (KHO) model, which displays stochastic webs resembling Arnold's diffusion that facilitate large-scale diffusion in the phase space. Although the Lyapunov exponent of the KHO at resonances remains close to zero in the weak perturbative regime, making the system weakly chaotic in the conventional sense, the classical phase space undergoes significant structural changes. Motivated by this, we study the OTOCs when the system is in resonance and contrast the results with the non-resonant case. At resonances, we observe that the long-time dynamics of the OTOCs are sensitive to these structural changes, where they grow quadratically as opposed to linear or stagnant growth at non-resonances. On the other hand, our findings suggest that the short-time dynamics remain relatively more stable and show the exponential growth found in the literature for unstable fixed points. The numerical results are backed by analytical expressions derived for a few special cases. We will then extend our findings concerning the non-resonant cases to a broad class of near-integrable KAM systems., Comment: 17 pages, 6 figures. Close to the accepted version in Phys. Rev. E

How does quantum chaos lead to rapid scrambling of information as well as errors across a system when one introduces perturbations in the dynamics? What are its consequences for the reliability of quantum simulations and quantum information processing? We employ continuous measurement quantum tomography as a paradigm to study these questions. The measurement record is generated as a sequence of expectation values of a Hermitian observable evolving under repeated application of the Floquet map of the quantum kicked top. Interestingly, we find that the reconstruction fidelity initially increases regardless of the degree of chaos or the strength of perturbations in the dynamics. For random states, when the measurement record is obtained from a random initial observable, the subsequent drop in the fidelity obtained is inversely correlated to the degree of chaos in the dynamics. More importantly, this also gives us an operational interpretation of Loschmidt echo for operators by connecting it to the performance of quantum tomography. We define a quantity to capture the scrambling of errors, an out-of-time-ordered correlator (OTOC) between two operators under perturbed and unperturbed system dynamics that serves as a signature of chaos and quantifies the spread of errors. Our results demonstrate not only a fundamental link between Loschmidt echo and scrambling of errors, as captured by OTOCs, but that such a link can have operational consequences in quantum information processing., Comment: 10 pages, 4 figures, new title, minor changes in the abstract and the main text with better presentation

Does chaos in the dynamics enable information gain in quantum tomography or impede it? We address this question by considering continuous measurement tomography in which the measurement record is obtained as a sequence of expectation values of a Hermitian observable evolving under the repeated application of the Floquet map of the quantum kicked top. For a given dynamics and Hermitian observables, we observe completely opposite behavior in the tomography of well-localized spin coherent states compared to random states. As the chaos in the dynamics increases, the reconstruction fidelity of spin coherent states decreases. This contrasts with the previous results connecting information gain in tomography of random states with the degree of chaos in the dynamics that drives the system. The rate of information gain and hence the fidelity obtained in tomography depends not only on the degree of chaos in the dynamics and to what extent it causes the initial observable to spread in various directions of the operator space but, more importantly, how well these directions are aligned with the density matrix to be estimated. Our study also gives an operational interpretation for operator spreading in terms of fidelity gain in an actual quantum information tomography protocol., Comment: 11 pages, 6 figures, published version with modified title

We study operator growth in a bipartite kicked coupled tops (KCT) system using out-of-time ordered correlators (OTOCs), which quantify ``information scrambling" due to chaotic dynamics and serve as a quantum analog of classical Lyapunov exponents. In the KCT system, chaos arises from the hyper-fine coupling between the spins. Due to a conservation law, the system's dynamics decompose into distinct invariant subspaces. Focusing initially on the largest subspace, we numerically verify that the OTOC growth rate aligns well with the classical Lyapunov exponent for fully chaotic dynamics. While previous studies have largely focused on scrambling in fully chaotic dynamics, works on mixed-phase space scrambling are sparse. We explore scrambling behavior in both mixed-phase space and globally chaotic dynamics. In the mixed phase space, we use Percival's conjecture to partition the eigenstates of the Floquet map into ``regular" and ``chaotic." Using these states as the initial states, we examine how their mean phase space locations affect the growth and saturation of the OTOCs. Beyond the largest subspace, we study the OTOCs across the entire system, including all other smaller subspaces. For certain initial operators, we analytically derive the OTOC saturation using random matrix theory (RMT). When the initial operators are chosen randomly from the unitarily invariant random matrix ensembles, the averaged OTOC relates to the linear entanglement entropy of the Floquet operator, as found in earlier works. For the diagonal Gaussian initial operators, we provide a simple expression for the OTOC., Comment: 17 pages, 13 figures, 1 table. Close to the accepted version in Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science

We study quantum tomography from a continuous measurement record obtained by measuring expectation values of a set of Hermitian operators obtained from unitary evolution of an initial observable. For this purpose, we consider the application of a random unitary, diagonal in a fixed basis at each time step and quantify the information gain in tomography using Fisher information of the measurement record and the Shannon entropy associated with the eigenvalues of covariance matrix of the estimation. Surprisingly, very high fidelity of reconstruction is obtained using random unitaries diagonal in a fixed basis even though the measurement record is not informationally complete. We then compare this with the information generated and fidelities obtained by application of a different Haar random unitary at each time step. We give an upper bound on the maximal information that can be obtained in tomography and show that a covariance matrix taken from the Wishart-Laguerre ensemble of random matrices and the associated Marchenko-Pastur distribution saturates this bound. We find that physically, this corresponds to an application of a different Haar random unitary at each time step. We show that repeated application of random diagonal unitaries gives a covariance matrix in tomographic estimation that corresponds to a new ensemble of random matrices. We analytically and numerically estimate eigenvalues of this ensemble and show the information gain to be bounded from below by the Porter-Thomas distribution., Comment: 12 pages, 9 figures

The out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOC) and the Loschmidt echo are two measures that are now widely being explored to characterize sensitivity to perturbations and information scrambling in complex quantum systems. Studying few qubits systems collectively modelled as a kicked top, we solve exactly the three- and four- qubit cases, giving analytical results for the OTOC and the Loschmidt echo. While we may not expect such few-body systems to display semiclassical features, we find that there are clear signatures of the exponential growth of OTOC even in systems with as low as 4 qubits in appropriate regimes, paving way for possible experimental measurements. We explain qualitatively how classical phase space structures like fixed points and periodic orbits have an influence on these quantities and how our results compare to the large-spin kicked top model. Finally we point to a peculiar case at the border of quantum-classical correspondence which is solvable for any number of qubits and yet has signatures of exponential sensitivity in a rudimentary form., Comment: 14 pages, 15 figures

Out-of-time-ordered correlators (OTOC) are a quantifier of quantum information scrambling and quantum chaos. We propose an efficient quantum algorithm to measure OTOCs that provides an exponential speed-up over the best known classical algorithm provided the OTOC operator to be estimated admits an efficient gate decomposition. We also discuss a scheme to obtain information about the eigenvalue spectrum and the spectral density of OTOCs., Comment: 5 pages

Exactly solvable models that exhibit quantum signatures of classical chaos are both rare as well as important - more so in view of the fact that the mechanisms for ergodic behavior and thermalization in isolated quantum systems and its connections to non-integrability are under active investigation. In this work, we study quantum systems of few qubits collectively modeled as a kicked top, a textbook example of quantum chaos. In particular, we show that the 3 and 4 qubit cases are exactly solvable and yet, interestingly, can display signatures of ergodicity and thermalization. Deriving analytical expressions for entanglement entropy and concurrence, we see agreement in certain parameter regimes between long-time average values and ensemble averages of random states with permutation symmetry. Comparing with results using the data of a recent transmons based experiment realizing the 3-qubit case, we find agreement for short times, including a peculiar step-like behaviour in correlations of some states. In the case of 4-qubits we point to a precursor of dynamical tunneling between what in the classical limit would be two stable islands. Numerical results for larger number of qubits show the emergence of the classical limit including signatures of a bifurcation., Comment: supersedes arXiv:1808.07741. More detailed analysis, new results, more figures

Exactly solvable models that exhibit quantum signatures of classical chaos are both rare as well as important - more so in view of the fact that the mechanisms for ergodic behavior and thermalization in isolated quantum systems and its connections to non-integrability are under active investigation. In this work, we study quantum systems of few qubits collectively modeled as a kicked top, a textbook example of quantum chaos. In particular, we show that the 3 and 4 qubit cases are exactly solvable and yet, interestingly, can display signatures of ergodicity and thermalization. Deriving analytical expressions for entanglement entropy and concurrence, we see agreement in certain parameter regimes between long-time average values and ensemble averages of random states with permutation symmetry. Comparing with results using the data of a recent transmons based experiment realizing the 3-qubit case, we find agreement for short times, including a peculiar step-like behaviour in correlations of some states. In the case of 4-qubits we point to a precursor of dynamical tunneling between what in the classical limit would be two stable islands. Numerical results for larger number of qubits show the emergence of the classical limit including signatures of a bifurcation., Comment: 6+5 pages, 7 figures

The central goal of a dynamical theory of evolution is to abstract the mean evolutionary trajectory in the trait space by considering ecological processes at the level of the individual. In this work, we develop such a theory for a new class of deterministic individual based models describing individual births and deaths, which captures the essential features of standard stochastic individual-based models and become identical with the latter under maximal competition. The key motivation is to derive the canonical equation of adaptive dynamics from this microscopic ecological model, which can be regarded as a "toy model" for evolution, in a simple way and give it an intuitive geometric interpretation. Another goal is to study evolution and sympatric speciation under "maximal" competition. We show that these models, in the deterministic limit of adaptive dynamics, lead to the same equations that describe the unraveling of the mean evolutionary trajectory as those obtained from the standard stochastic models. We further study conditions under which these models lead to evolutionary branching and find them to be similar with those obtained from the standard stochastic models. We find that though deterministic models result in a strong competition that leads to a speed up in the temporal dynamics of a population cloud in the phenotypic space as well as an increase in the rate of generation of biodiversity, it does not seem to result in an absolute increase in biodiversity as far as total number of species are concerned. Hence, the "toy model" essentially captures all the features of the standard stochastic model. Interestingly, the notion of a fitness function does not explicitly enter in our derivation of the canonical equation, thereby advocating a mechanistic view of evolution., Comment: A rigorous development on arXiv:1601.07830

Many-body states that are invariant under particle relabelling, the permutation symmetric states, occur naturally when the system dynamics is described by symmetric processes or collective spin operators. We derive expressions for the reduced density matrix for arbitrary subsystem decomposition for these states and study properties of permutation symmetric states and their subsystems when the joint system is picked randomly and uniformly. Thus defining a new random matrix ensemble, we find the average linear entropy and von Neumann entropy which implies that random permutation symmetric states are marginally entangled and as a consequence the tripartite mutual information (TMI) is typically positive, preventing information from being shared globally. Applying these results to the quantum kicked top viewed as a multi-qubit system we find that entanglement, mutual information and TMI all increase for large subsystems across the Ehrenfest or log-time and saturate at the random state values if there is global chaos. During this time the out-of-time order correlators (OTOC) evolve exponentially implying scrambling in phase space. We discuss how positive TMI may coexist with such scrambling., Comment: Minor modifications to the text, references added; published in Phys. Rev. E 98, 052205, doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.98.052205

Long-time average behavior of quantum correlations in a multi-qubit system, collectively modeled as a kicked top, is addressed here. The behavior of dynamical generation of quantum correlations such as entanglement, discord, concurrence, as previously studied, and Bell correlation function and tangle, as identified in this study, is a function of initially localized coherent states. Their long-time average reproduces coarse-grained classical phase space structures of the kicked top which contrast, often starkly, chaotic and regular regions. Apart from providing numerical evidence of such correspondence in the semiclassical regime of a large number of qubits, we use data from a recent transmons based experiment to explore this in the deep quantum regime of a 3-qubit kicked top. The degree to which quantum correlations can be regarded as a quantum signature of chaos, and in what ways the various correlation measures are similar or distinct are discussed., Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures

We study quasi-species and closely related evolutionary dynamics like the replicator-mutator equation in high dimensions. In particular, we show that under certain conditions the fitness of almost all quasi-species becomes independent of mutational probabilities and the initial frequency distributions of the sequences in high dimensional sequence spaces. This result is the consequence of the concentration of measure on a high dimensional hypersphere and its extension to Lipschitz functions known %knows as the Levy's Lemma. Therefore, evolutionary dynamics almost always yields the same value for fitness of the quasi-species, independent of the mutational process and initial conditions, and is quite robust to mutational changes and fluctuations in initial conditions. Our results naturally extend to any Lipschitz function whose input parameters are the frequencies of individual constituents of the quasi-species. This suggests that the functional capabilities of high dimensional quasi-species are robust to fluctuations in the mutational probabilities and initial conditions. We discuss the consequences of our study for the replicator-mutator equation., Comment: New results, 4 new figures and analysis. A rigorous development on arXiv:1607.00483

We show that, under certain assumptions, the fitness of almost all quasi-species becomes independent of mutational probabilities and the initial frequency distributions of the sequences in high dimensional sequence spaces. This result is the consequence of the concentration of measure on a high dimensional hypersphere and its extension to Lipschitz functions knows as the Levy's Lemma. Therefore, evolutionary dynamics almost always yields the same value for fitness of the quasi-species, independent of the mutational process and initial conditions, and is quite robust to mutational changes and fluctuations in initial conditions. Our results naturally extend to any Lipschitz function whose input parameters are the frequencies of individual constituents of the quasi-species. This suggests that the functional capabilities of high dimensional quasi-species are robust to fluctuations in the mutational probabilities and initial conditions., Comment: Ideas on high dimensionality geometry, concentration of measure and quasi-species evolution. Work in progress

We propose a faster algorithm for individual based simulations for adaptive dynamics based on a simple modification to the standard Gillespie Algorithm for simulating stochastic birth-death processes. We provide an analytical explanation that shows that simulations based on the modified algorithm, in the deterministic limit, lead to the same equations of adaptive dynamics as well as same conditions for evolutionary branching as those obtained from the standard Gillespie algorithm. Based on this algorithm, we provide an intuitive and simple interpretation of the canonical equation of adaptive dynamics. With the help of examples we compare the performance of this algorithm to the standard Gillespie algorithm and demonstrate its efficiency. We also study an example using this algorithm to study evolutionary dynamics in a multi-dimensional phenotypic space and study the question of predictability of evolution., Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures

We comment on the investigation of the connection between chaos and dynamically generated entanglement in Phys. Rev. E, \textbf{83}, 016207, (2011). While, in the referred paper, the authors give an explicit example of a state initially localized in the regular region and still has entanglement properties similar to the states localized in the chaotic region, a few clarifications related to previous works are in order. Firstly, it is crucial to point out that such a behavior can occur for states initially localized near the border between the chaotic region and regular island, which seems to be the case in the example provided in the referred paper. We comment on the time evolution of such states and the extent to which these can be regarded as having "regular dynamics". Secondly, the degree to which entanglement is correlated with the chaos in the system is better understood when we analyze the same initial state and increase the chaoticity in the system gradually. We also discuss in what capacity entanglement can be regarded as a signature of chaos in such studies., Comment: see also, the reply, Phys. Rev. E 92, 036902, 2015

Most theories of evolutionary diversification are based on equilibrium assumptions: they are either based on optimality arguments involving static fitness landscapes, or they assume that populations first evolve to an equilibrium state before diversification occurs, as exemplified by the concept of evolutionary branching points in adaptive dynamics theory. Recent results indicate that adaptive dynamics may often not converge to equilibrium points and instead generate complicated trajectories if evolution takes place in high-dimensional phenotype spaces. Even though some analytical results on diversification in complex phenotype spaces are available, to study this problem in general we need to reconstruct individual-based models from the adaptive dynamics generating the non-equilibrium dynamics. Here we first provide a method to construct individual-based models such that they faithfully reproduce the given adaptive dynamics attractor without diversification. We then show that a propensity to diversify can by introduced by adding Gaussian competition terms that generate frequency dependence while still preserving the same adaptive dynamics. For sufficiently strong competition, the disruptive selection generated by frequency-dependence overcomes the directional evolution along the selection gradient and leads to diversification in phenotypic directions that are orthogonal to the selection gradient., Comment: 23 pages, 7 figures, please open pdf with Acrobat to see movies

We explore quantum signatures of classical chaos by studying the rate of information gain in quantum tomography. The tomographic record consists of a time series of expectation values of a Hermitian operator evolving under application of the Floquet operator of a quantum map that possesses (or lacks) time reversal symmetry. We find that the rate of information gain, and hence the fidelity of quantum state reconstruction, depends on the symmetry class of the quantum map involved. Moreover, we find an increase in information gain and hence higher reconstruction fidelities when the Floquet maps employed increase in chaoticity. We make predictions for the information gain and show that these results are well described by random matrix theory in the fully chaotic regime. We derive analytical expressions for bounds on information gain using random matrix theory for different class of maps and show that these bounds are realized by fully chaotic quantum systems., Comment: 19 pages, Invited review for Pramana J of physics. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1212.4572

For general dissipative dynamical systems we study what fraction of solutions exhibit chaotic behavior depending on the dimensionality $d$ of the phase space. We find that a system of $d$ globally coupled ODE's with quadratic and cubic non-linearities with random coefficients and initial conditions, the probability of a trajectory to be chaotic increases universally from $\sim 10^{-5} - 10^{-4}$ for $d=3$ to essentially one for $d\sim 50$. In the limit of large $d$, the invariant measure of the dynamical systems exhibits universal scaling that depends on the degree of non-linearity but does not depend on the choice of coefficients, and the largest Lyapunov exponent converges to a universal scaling limit. Using statistical arguments, we provide analytical explanations for the observed scaling and for the probability of chaos., Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures

We identify signatures of chaos in the dynamics of discord in a multiqubit system collectively modelled as a quantum kicked top. The evolution of discord between any two qubits is quasiperiodic in regular regions, while in chaotic regions, the quasiperiodicity is lost. As the initial wave function is varied from the regular regions to the chaotic sea, a contour plot of the time averaged discord remarkably reproduces the structures of the classical stroboscopic map. We also find surprisingly opposite behaviour of two-qubit discord versus two-qubit entanglement. Our calculations provide the first evidence of signatures of chaos in dynamically generated discord., Comment: 6 pages, 6 figures

We propose a 2N qubit entangled channel that can be used to teleport N qubits in a network to a single receiver. We describe the construction of this channel and explicitly demonstrate how the protocol works. The protocol is different from teleportation using $N$ Bell pairs shared between $N$ senders and a single receiver, as it ensures that all parties have to participate in order for the teleportation to be successful. This can be advantageous in various scenarios and we discuss potential application of this protocol to voting.

We find quantum signatures of classical chaos in various metrics of information gain in quantum tomography. We employ a quantum state estimator based on weak collective measurements of an ensemble of identically prepared systems. The tomographic measurement record consists of a sequence of expectation values of a Hermitian operator that evolves under repeated application of the Floquet map of the quantum kicked top. We find an increase in information gain and hence higher fidelities in the reconstruction algorithm when the chaoticity parameter map increases. The results are well predicted by random matrix theory.

Quantum chaos is the study of quantum systems whose classical description is chaotic. How does chaos manifest itself in the quantum world? In this spirit, we study the dynamical generation of entanglement as a signature of chaos in a system of periodically kicked coupled-tops, where chaos and entanglement arise from the same physical mechanism. The long-time entanglement as a function of the position of an initially localized wave packet very closely correlates with the classical phase space surface of section - it is nearly uniform in the chaotic sea, and reproduces the detailed structure of the regular islands. The uniform value in the chaotic sea is explained by the random state conjecture. As classically chaotic dynamics take localized distributions in phase space to random distributions, quantized versions take localized coherent states to pseudo-random states in Hilbert space. Such random states are highly entangled, with an average value near that of the maximally entangled state. Continuing on our journey to find the footprints of chaos in the quantum world, we explore quantum signatures of classical chaos by studying the rate of information gain in quantum tomography. We find an increase in the rate of information gain and hence higher fidelities in the process when the Floquet maps employed increase in chaoticity. We make predictions for the information gain using random matrix theory in the fully chaotic regime and show a remarkable agreement between the two. The last part of this thesis is devoted to the study of the nature of quantum correlations themselves. We present an operational interpretation of quantum discord based on the quantum state merging protocol. Quantum discord is the markup in the cost of quantum communication in the process of quantum state merging, if one discards relevant prior information., Comment: Dissertation

As quantum technologies move from the issues of principle to those of practice, it is important to understand the limitations on attaining tangible quantum advantages. In the realm of quantum communication, quantum discord captures the damaging effects of a decoherent environment. This is a consequence of quantum discord quantifying the advantage of quantum coherence in quantum communication. This establishes quantum discord as a resource for quantum communication processes. We discuss this progress, which derives a quantitative relation between the yield of the fully quantum Slepian-Wolf protocol in the presence of noise and the quantum discord of the state involved. The significance of quantum discord in noisy versions of teleportation, super-dense coding, entanglement distillation and quantum state merging are discussed. These results lead to open questions regarding the tradeoff between quantum entanglement and discord in choosing the optimal quantum states for attaining palpable quantum advantages in noisy quantum protocols., Comment: 9 pages, no figures. Published version

Positivity of quantum discord is shown to be equivalent to the strong sub additivity of the Von-Nuemann entropy. This leads to a connection between the mother protocol of quantum information theory [A. Abeyesinghe, I. Devetak, P. Hayden, and A. Winter, Proc. R. Soc. A 465, 2537, (2009)] and quantum discord. We exploit this to show that quantum discord is a measure coherence in the performance of the mother protocol. Since the mother protocol is a unification of an important class of problems (those that are bipartite, unidirectional and memoryless), we show quantum discord to be a measure of coherence in these protocols. Our work generalizes an earlier operational interpretation of quantum discord provided in terms of quantum state merging [V. Madhok and A. Datta, Phys. Rev. A 83, 032323, (2011)]., Comment: To be published in Springer's Lecture Notes in Computer Science as proceedings of The sixth Conference on the Theory of Quantum Computation, Communication and Cryptography (TQC,2011) under the title `Quantum discord in quantum information theory - From strong subadditivity to the Mother protocol'

We present an operational interpretation of quantum discord based on the quantum state merging protocol. Quantum discord is the markup in the cost of quantum communication in the process of quantum state merging, if one discards relevant prior information. Our interpretation has an intuitive explanation based on the strong subadditivity of von Neumann entropy. We use our result to provide operational interpretations of other quantities like the local purity and quantum deficit. Finally, we discuss in brief some instances where our interpretation is valid in the single copy scenario., Comment: 5 pages, no figures. See http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.3205 for similar results. Typos fixed, references and acknowledgements updated. End note added