Quantum discord of a three-qubit W-class state in noisy environments

We study the dynamics of the pairwise quantum discord (QD), classical correlation (CC), and entanglement of formation (EOF) for the three-qubit W-class state |W>_{123}=\frac 12(|100>_{123}+|010>_{123}+\sqrt{2}|001>_{123}) under the influence of various Markovian noises by analytically solving the master equation in the Lindblad form. Through numerical analysis, we find that EOF decreases asymptotically to zero with time for the dephasing noise, but it undergoes sudden death for the bit-flip noise, the isotropic noise, as well as the dissipative and noisy environments. Moreover, QD decays to zero in an asymptotical way for all the noises we investigated. Thus, when the W-class state |W>_{123} is subject to the above Markovian noises, QD is more robust than EOF against decoherence excluding the phase-flip noise, implying that QD is more useful than entanglement to characterize the quantum correlation. We also find a remarkable character for the CC in the presence of the phase-flip noise, i.e., CC displays the behavior of sudden transition and then keeps constant permanently, but the corresponding QD just exhibits a very small sudden change. Furthermore, we verify the monogamic relation between the pairwise QD and EOF of the W-class state.