Extreme Points and Factorizability for New Classes of Unital Quantum Channels

Abstract

We introduce and study two new classes of unital quantum channels. The first class describes a 2-parameter family of channels given by completely positive (CP) maps $M_3({\bf C}) \mapsto M_3({\bf C})$ which are both unital and trace-preserving. Almost every member of this family is factorizable and extreme in the set of CP maps which are both unital and trace-preserving, but is not extreme in either the set of unital CP maps or the set of trace-preserving CP maps. We also study a large class of maps which generalize the Werner-Holevo channel for $d = 3$ in the sense that they are defined in terms of partial isometries of rank $d-1$. Moreover, we extend this to maps whose Kraus operators have the form $t |e_j \rangle \langle e_j | \oplus V $ with $V \in M_{d-1} ({\bf C}) $ unitary and $t \in (-1,1)$. We show that almost every map in this class is extreme in both the set of unital CP maps and the set of trace-preserving CP maps. We analyze in detail a particularly interesting subclass which is extreme unless $t = -1/(d-1)$. For $d = 3$, this includes a pair of channels which have a dual factorization in the sense that they can be obtained by taking the partial trace over different subspaces after using the same unitary conjugation in $M_3({\bf C}) \otimes M_3({\bf C})$.