Quantum correlation versus Bell-inequality violation under the amplitude damping channel

We investigate the quantum correlations including quantum discord and entanglement under the amplitude damping channel. Our analysis results indicate that although the entanglement of initial state is degraded due to decoherence, the distribution trend of entanglement is not to be affected. Moreover, we find that the survival time for entanglement is much longer than for the Bell inequality violation, i.e., as time goes on the Bell inequality violation of final state may be not satisfied while the final state still remains entangled. Especially, although quantum entanglement and quantum discord all decrease under the amplitude damping channel, quantum discord (QD) is reduced significantly slower than entanglement. Therefore, the quantum discord is more robust against amplitude damping in comparison to entanglement measures. Furthermore, we also find that there are mixed states having quantum discord higher than that for pure states for a given degree of Bell's inequality violation. This means that the manipulation of nonclassical correlations via a pure state can result in a larger loss of quantum discord than that via a mixed state. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.