Quantum Information as a Measure of Multipartite Correlation

Abstract

The mutual information has been successfully used as a measure of correlation strength between quantum systems, especially for bipartite systems. Here we examine the use of this measure for multipartite quantum systems. For system of qubits we find that the difference between `classical' and `quantum' regimes of correlation strength amounts to just 1 bit of information, at most. We show that the information content of a correlation can be expanded into correlations between pairwise components and demonstrate that in terms of this information-based measure of correlation the GHZ states are the only states that simultaneously optimize these pairwise correlations for systems of qubits.