Thermal quantum discord in the Heisenberg chain with impurity

We study thermal quantum discord (TQD) in the Heisenberg chain with spin site or magnetic impurity. The former one of which may induce inhomogeneous exchange interactions between the neighboring spins, while the latter one may model a spin chain with nonuniform magnetic field. In contrast to one׳s traditional understanding, we found that the spin impurity can be used to enhance the TQD greatly for all the bipartition schemes of the chain, while the magnetic impurity located on one spin can make the TQD between the other two spins approaching its maximum 1 for the antiferromagnetic chain.