{"id":6776,"date":"2012-12-31T11:30:42","date_gmt":"2012-12-31T18:30:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/?p=6776"},"modified":"2012-12-31T11:30:42","modified_gmt":"2012-12-31T18:30:42","slug":"pop-goes-the-discord-bubble","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dabacon.org\/pontiff\/2012\/12\/31\/pop-goes-the-discord-bubble\/","title":{"rendered":"Pop goes the discord bubble"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well, the rat is out of the bag;\u00a0Schroedinger’s Rat<\/a>, that is. That’s the new quantum blog by\u00a0Miguel Navascues<\/a>\u00a0and 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.\u00a0Miguel 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.
\nMiguel’s\u00a0second post<\/a>\u00a0is all about\u00a0quantum discord<\/a>. 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:<\/p>\n

The quantum discord of a bipartite state was first defined by\u00a0Ollivier and Zurek<\/a>\u00a0as the difference between its original quantum mutual information and the same quantity after we perform a rank-1 projective measurement on one part.
\nNow, 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…<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you thought he was exaggerating, here is a paper that has been cited 263 times since May 2009:\u00a0Robustness of quantum discord to sudden death<\/a>. Wow, discord is immortal! And in case you want more, you can just go to\u00a0quantumdiscord.org<\/a>\u00a0and find a list of discord papers and see for yourself.
\nBefore we can treat the patient we have to understand the disease, and this is exemplified by a typically test case:\u00a0Quantum discord for two-qubit X-states<\/a>\u00a0(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:\u00a0Scott’s students’ homework<\/a>\u00a0is much more interesting and relevant.
\nBut Steve! What about all the\u00a0<\/em>good<\/strong>\u00a0discord papers? You can’t just trash the entire field!\u00a0<\/em>
\nYou’re absolutely right, there\u00a0are<\/em>\u00a0good 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\u00a0intrinsically<\/em>\u00a0uninteresting; 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<\/a>, because it has really gotten completely out of control.
\nHere are some good rules of thumb for those moments when\u00a0you 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\u00a0is<\/em>\u00a0related 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 $latex n$ qubits. And if your weak theory result suffers from one or more of the above but you add in some equally unimpressive experimental results to cover up that fact, then you absolutely, unequivocally do not have a good discord paper. I don’t care what journal it’s published in, it is not a good paper and you should be ashamed of yourself for inflating the bubble even further.
\nAs bad as the authors are, this bubble is also the fault of the referees.\u00a0Simply being correct is not enough to warrant publication.<\/em>\u00a0It also has to be new, non-trivial, and interesting. Please referees, “Just Say No” to papers that don’t meet this standard!
\nEnough of this bad medicine. In the comments,\u00a0feel free to mention some of the\u00a0actually good<\/em>\u00a0discord papers, and why they deserve to keep their value after the bubble bursts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well, the rat is out of the bag;\u00a0Schroedinger’s Rat, that is. That’s the new quantum blog by\u00a0Miguel Navascues\u00a0and 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.\u00a0Miguel is fearless about shouting his colorful … <\/p>\n

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