Dakic, Vedral and Brukner [Physical Review Letters \tf{105},190502 (2010)] gave a geometric measure of quantum discord in a bipartite quantum state as the distance of the state from the closest classical quantum (or zero discord) state and derived an explicit formula for a two qubit state. Further, S.Luo and S.Fu [Physical Review A \tf{82}, 034302 (2010)] obtained a generic form of this geometric measure for a general bipartite state and established a lower bound. In this brief report we obtain a rigorous lower bound to the geometric measure of quantum discord in a general bipartite state which dominates that obtained by S.Luo and S.Fu.Comment: 10 pages,2 figures. In the previous versions, a constraint was ignored while optimizing the second term in Eq.(5), in which case, only a lower bound on the geometric discord can be obtained. The title is also consequently changed. Accepted in Phys.Rev.

We give a new separability criterion, a necessary condition for separability of N-partite quantum states. The criterion is based on the Bloch representation of a N-partite quantum state and makes use of multilinear algebra, in particular, the matrization of tensors. Our criterion applies to arbitrary N-partite quantum states in $\mathcal{H}=\mathcal{H}^{d_1}\otimes \mathcal{H}^{d_2} \otimes \cdots \otimes \mathcal{H}^{d_N}.$ The criterion can test whether a N-partite state is entangled and can be applied to different partitions of the $N$-partite system. We provide examples that show the ability of this criterion to detect entanglement. We show that this criterion can detect bound entangled states. We prove a sufficiency condition for separability of a 3-partite state, straightforwardly generalizable to the case N > 3, under certain condition. We also give a necessary and sufficient condition for separability of a class of N-qubit states which includes N-qubit PPT states.

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We investigate how thermal quantum discord (QD) and classical correlations (CC) of a two-qubit one-dimensional XX Heisenberg chain in thermal equilibrium depend on the temperature of the bath as well as on nonuniform external magnetic fields applied to two qubits and varied separately. We show that the behavior of QD differs in many unexpected ways from the thermal entanglement (EOF). For the nonuniform case (B1 = −B2), we find that QD and CC are equal for all values of (B1 = −B2) and for different temperatures. We show that, in this case, the thermal states of the system belong to a class of mixed states and satisfy certain conditions under which QD and CC are equal. The specification of this class and the corresponding conditions are completely general and apply to any quantum system in a state in this class satisfying these conditions. We further find that the relative contributions of QD and CC can be controlled easily by changing the relative magnitudes of B1 and B2. Finally, we connect our results with the monogamy relations between the EOF, CC and the QD of two qubits and the environment.