Non-classicality of coherent state mixtures

TL;DR

This paper reveals quantum advantages in mixtures of coherent states, challenging their classical classification, and introduces the discord potential as a robust measure of non-classicality that captures these quantum features.

Contribution

It demonstrates quantum advantages in coherent state mixtures, introduces the discord potential as a new non-classicality measure, and provides methods to compute quantum information quantities for non-Gaussian states.

Findings

Quantum advantage in discriminating coherent state mixtures.

Discord potential satisfies desired non-classicality properties.

Coherence monotones diverge for classically distinguishable states.

Abstract

Mixtures of coherent states are commonly regarded as classical. Here we show that there is a quantum advantage in discriminating between coherent states in a mixture, implying the presence of quantum properties in the mixture, which are however not captured by commonly used non-classicality measures. We identify a set of desired properties for any non-classicality measure that aims to capture these quantum features, and define the discord potential CD, which we show to satisfy all those properties. We compare the discord potential with recently proposed coherence monotones, and prove that the coherence monotones diverge for classically distinguishable states, thus indicating their failure to quantify non-classicality in this limit. On the technical side, we provide a simple method of calculating the discord as well as other information-theoretic quantities for the (non-Gaussian) output of any input state with positive P-function.