Last Thursday, at the QIP rump session in Beijing, John Smolin described recent work with Graeme Smith and Alex Vargo [SSV] showing that arbitrarily large numbers
to implement a compiled version of Shor’s algorithm. The key to SSV’s breathtaking improvement is to choose a base for exponentiation,
Pop goes the discord bubble
Well, the rat is out of the bag; Schroedinger’s Rat, that is. That’s the new quantum blog by Miguel Navascues and boy is it snarky! I was keeping it under my hat for a while so I could enjoy it privately, but the time has come to announce it to the world. Miguel is fearless about shouting his colorful opinions from the rooftops, and I can respect that, even if I don’t agree with everything he says.
Miguel’s second post is all about quantum discord. As anyone who reads quant-ph knows, there are around two or three papers per week about discord for years now. Unfortunately, a huge number of these are nearly worthless! Quoth the Rat:
The quantum discord of a bipartite state was first defined by Ollivier and Zurek as the difference between its original quantum mutual information and the same quantity after we perform a rank-1 projective measurement on one part.
Now, what does that mean? Probably, nothing. But lack of motivation has never prevented investigation at international scale. And so we ended up with one more research topic that clearly goes nowhere, in the line of entanglement sudden death…
If you thought he was exaggerating, here is a paper that has been cited 263 times since May 2009: Robustness of quantum discord to sudden death. Wow, discord is immortal! And in case you want more, you can just go to quantumdiscord.org and find a list of discord papers and see for yourself.
Before we can treat the patient we have to understand the disease, and this is exemplified by a typically test case: Quantum discord for two-qubit X-states (cited 256 times). The authors compute the quantum discord and a few other entanglement measures for a family of two-qubit states and conclude that there is no obvious relationship between the various measures. Why did they do this? “Because it’s there” might have been a good reason to scale Everest, but this feels more like a homework assignment for a graduate course. Wait, I take that back: Scott’s students’ homework is much more interesting and relevant.
But Steve! What about all the good discord papers? You can’t just trash the entire field!
You’re absolutely right, there are good discord papers. I can even name about 5 of them, and I’m willing to bet there are as many as 12 or 15 total. My intention is definitely not to trash the subject as intrinsically uninteresting; rather, I want to highlight the epidemic of pointless papers that constitute the discord bubble. I hope that thinning the herd will increase the quality of the results in the field and decrease the hype surrounding it, because it has really gotten completely out of control.
Here are some good rules of thumb for those moments when you find yourself writing a discord paper. If you are calculating something and you don’t know why you are calculating it, then close your latex editor. You do not have one of the good discord papers. If the discord you calculated is not related to a resource (physical, computational, etc.) in a quantifiable way, you probably don’t have a good discord paper. If it is related to a resource, but you had to concoct that relationship in a totally ad hoc way that doesn’t generalize, then you do not have a good discord paper. Ditto if the relationship is via a protocol that literally nobody cares about. If you only have two qubits, you almost certainly don’t have a good discord paper. Good theory papers usually have
As bad as the authors are, this bubble is also the fault of the referees. Simply being correct is not enough to warrant publication. It also has to be new, non-trivial, and interesting. Please referees, “Just Say No” to papers that don’t meet this standard!
Enough of this bad medicine. In the comments, feel free to mention some of the actually good discord papers, and why they deserve to keep their value after the bubble bursts.