Quantum discord expresses a fundamental non-classicality of correlations more general than quantum entanglement. We combine the no-local-broadcasting theorem, semidefinite-programming characterizations of quantum fidelity and quantum separability, and a recent breakthrough result of Fawzi and Renner about quantum Markov chains to provide a hierarchy of computationally efficient lower bounds to quantum discord. Such a hierarchy converges to the surprisal of measurement recoverability introduced by Seshadreesan and Wilde, and provides a faithful lower bound to quantum discord already at the lowest non-trivial level. Furthermore, the latter constitutes by itself a valid discord-like measure of the quantumness of correlations.
PACS numbers:Introduction.-Correlations in quantum mechanics exhibit non-classical features that include non-locality [1], steering [2], entanglement [3], and quantum discord [4]. Quantum correlations play a fundamental role in quantum information processing and quantum technologies [5], which go from quantum cryptography [6] to quantum metrology [7]. While both non-locality and steering are manifestations of entanglement, quantum discord is a more general form of quantumness of correlations that includes entanglement but goes beyond it. In particular, almost all distributed states exhibit discord [8]. This fact calls for fully elevating the study of quantum discord to the quantitative level, since just certifying that discord is present may be considered of limited interest. While several approaches to the quantification of discord have been already proposed (see, e.g. [4,[9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22] and references therein), in this paper we significantly push forward a meaningful, reliable, and practical quantitative approach to the study of quantum discord that is based on fundamental quantum features of quantum correlations, and at the same time is computationally friendly.