TY - JOUR T1 - Discontinuity of Maximum Entropy Inference and Quantum Phase Transitions JF - New Journal of Physics Y1 - 2015 A1 - Jianxin Chen A1 - Zhengfeng Ji A1 - Chi-Kwong Li A1 - Yiu-Tung Poon A1 - Yi Shen A1 - Nengkun Yu A1 - Bei Zeng A1 - Duanlu Zhou AB - In this paper, we discuss the connection between two genuinely quantum phenomena --- the discontinuity of quantum maximum entropy inference and quantum phase transitions at zero temperature. It is shown that the discontinuity of the maximum entropy inference of local observable measurements signals the non-local type of transitions, where local density matrices of the ground state change smoothly at the transition point. We then propose to use the quantum conditional mutual information of the ground state as an indicator to detect the discontinuity and the non-local type of quantum phase transitions in the thermodynamic limit. VL - 17 U4 - 083019 UR - http://arxiv.org/abs/1406.5046v2 CP - 8 J1 - New J. Phys. U5 - 10.1088/1367-2630/17/8/083019 ER -