ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Quantum discord

Quantum discord is a bit like a game of hide-and-seek between two particles. Imagine you have two toy cars that light up when they touch each other, but you want to figure out where they are without touching them together. In quantum physics, particles can be "entangled," which means they behave as a single system even when they are far apart. When particles are entangled, you can learn something about one particle just by looking at the other.

But what happens when the entangled particles don't want to cooperate? This is where quantum discord comes in. Sometimes, the two particles might be entangled but also have their own individual "personalities" that they want to keep secret. In other words, they might be hiding something from each other.

When this happens, it becomes difficult for scientists to use one particle to learn things about the other one. They might be able to measure one particle, but they won't be able to tell exactly what the other particle is up to. This kind of behavior is called quantum discord.

To understand it, think of those toy cars again. If the cars had secret switches that turned their lights on and off randomly, then you might not be able to predict when they would light up, even if they were entangled. This is what quantum discord is like – sometimes the particles have hidden information that makes predicting their behavior very hard.

Overall, quantum discord is a way of describing when entangled particles don't fully cooperate with each other. It's an important concept in quantum physics because it helps scientists understand how particles behave when they are working together as a system.