Quantifying correlations via local channels

Quantum channels, in general, will disturb quantum states and will lead to decoherence (i.e., information leakage to the environment). For bipartite systems, local channels often cause more decoherence for global states than for local states due to correlations. Intuitively, the difference between these two kinds of decoherence (i.e., global and local ones) may be regarded as a quantifier characterizing certain aspects of correlations in the global bipartite states. Based on this idea, we introduce a quantifier of correlations (relative to a local channel) as the coherence difference and investigate its basic properties. We probe and quantify correlations relative to various channels including the unitary channels, the twirling channels, the projective measurements, and the weak measurements. In particular, we show that both product states and some natural classical-quantum states can be operationally characterized in terms of local channels: The product states are just those states with vanishing coherence difference relative to the twirling channel induced by the unitary group, whereas these natural classical-quantum states are just those states with vanishing coherence difference relative to the twirling channel induced by the subgroup of the unitary group that does not disturb the local states. We further illustrate the results by various examples.