Computing coherence vectors and correlation matrices, with application to quantum discord quantification

Abstract

Coherence vectors and correlation matrices are important functions frequently used in physics. The numerical calculation of these functions directly from their definitions, which involves Kronecker products and matrix multiplications, may seem to be a reasonable option. Notwithstanding, as we demonstrate in this article, some algebraic manipulations before programming can reduce considerably their computational complexity. Besides, we provide Fortran code to generate generalized Gell Mann matrices and to compute the optimized and unoptimized versions of the associated Bloch's vectors and correlation matrix, in the case of bipartite quantum systems. As a code test and application example, we consider the calculation of Hilbert-Schmidt quantum discords.