Improving classical capacity of qubit dynamical maps through stationary state manipulation

Abstract

We analyze the evolution of Holevo and entanglement-assisted classical capacities for two classes of phase-covariant channels. In particular, we show that these capacities can be improved by changing the stationary state of the channel, which is closely related to its non-unitality degree. The more non-unital the channel, the greater its capacity. The channel parameters are engineered through mixtures on the level of dynamical maps, time-local generators, and memory kernels, for which we propose construction methods. For highly non-unital maps, we achieve a temporary increase in the classical capacity that exceeds the entanglement-assisted classical capacity of the unital map. This shows that non-unitality can become a better quantum resource for information transition purposes than quantum entanglement.