Eur. Phys. J. D (2012) 66: 250
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjd/e2012-30296-8

Regular Article

Sudden switch of correlation building velocity in a strong transverse field Ising spin chain

¹ Beijing National Laboratory for Condensed Matter Physics, and Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100190, P.R. China
² School of Physics and Electronic Science, Changsha University of Science and Technology, Changsha 410114, P.R. China

^a e-mail: gy800916@yahoo.com.cn

Received: 8 May 2012
Received in final form: 25 July 2012
Published online: 4 October 2012

Abstract

How fast to build correlations between two distant nodes in a spin network through local interactions is a practical problem in quantum information tasks. In this paper, we study the correlation building velocity in an Ising spin chain with a strong transverse field. We adopt and compare four correlation measures for characterizing different types of correlations, which include correlation function, mutual information, quantum discord, and entanglement of formation. We find that there is a sudden switch of the correlation building velocity with the increase of the number of spin, and the appearance of the sudden switch is independent of the correlation measures adopted.