Gaussian multipartite quantum discord from classical mutual information

Quantum discord is a measure of non-classical correlations, which are excess correlations inherent in quantum states that cannot be accessed by classical measurements. For multipartite states, the classically accessible correlations can be defined by the mutual information of the multipartite measurement outcomes. In general the quantum discord of an arbitrary quantum state involves an optimisation of over the classical measurements which is hard to compute. In this paper, we examine the quantum discord in the experimentally relevant case when the quantum states are Gaussian and the measurements are restricted to Gaussian measurements. We perform the optimisation over the measurements to find the Gaussian discord of the bipartite EPR state and tripartite GHZ state in the presence of different types of noise: uncorrelated noise, multiplicative noise and correlated noise. We find that by adding uncorrelated noise and multiplicative noise, the quantum discord always decreases. However, correlated noise can either increase or decrease the quantum discord. We also find that for low noise, the measurements that maximise the classically accessible correlations are single quadrature measurements. As the noise increases, a dual quadrature measurement becomes optimal.