Tight bounds for the quantum discord

Quantum discord quantifies quantum correlations beyond entanglement and assumes nonzero values, which are notoriously hard to compute, for almost all quantum states. Here we provide computable tight bounds for the quantum discord for qubit-qudit states. In the case of two qubits our lower and upper bounds coincide for a 7-parameter family of filtered $X$-states, whose quantum discords can therefore be evaluated analytically. An application to the accessible information of the binary qubit channel is also presented. For the qubit-qudit state output by the circuit of deterministic computation with one qubit, nontrivial lower and upper bounds that respect the zero-discord conditions are obtained for its quantum discord.