Eventually entanglement breaking Markovian dynamics: structure and characteristic times (Q2172976)

The distribution of entanglement via a noisy channel is an important topic in quantum information, which greatly limits the quantum communication protocols. Generally, if half of an entangled state undergoes a noisy channel, the entanglement will be lost. In this paper, the authors study the entanglement breaking times of Markovian evolutions. To do so, the authors classify the quantum evolutions into continuous and discrete-time quantum Markov semigroups with rigorous mathematical definitions. They consider the eventually entanglement breaking in continuous time, that is, the finite time after which the initial entanglement is destroyed through the noisy channel; and the entanglement breaking index in the discrete-time, that is, the number of times after which the entanglement is destroyed by the interaction with the channel. It is shown that the continuous-time QMS with the class of eventually entanglement breaking is precisely the one which possess a unique full-rank invariant state, the continuous-time QMS with entanglement asymptotically breaking are those possessing a non-trivial, yet commutative DF subalgebra, and the QMS with a non-commutative DF subalgebra never break entanglement. Besides, the quantitative lower bound on the entanglement breaking time is given based on the exploration of the connection between the spectrum of a quantum channel and the positive partial transpose (PPT) criterion of its Choi matrix, while the upper bounds are obtained by the rapid-decoherence property of Markovian evolutions. They also discuss the application of continuous-time decoherence bounds to approximate quantum Markov networks. In the discrete time setting, the authors study the ability of irreducible quantum channels to preserve entanglement and demonstrate the irreducible quantum channels that only become entanglement breaking asymptotically and a converse case for channels with an invariant state of full rank we obtain a converse. If an invariant state of full rank, they also show that quantum PPT channels become entanglement breaking after a finite number of iterations, and then extend the result to faithful completely positive maps. To obtain quantitative bounds, the authors study the decoherence-free sub algebra of discrete-time evolution, and its contraction properties. They establish the discrete-time Poincare inequalities to give entanglement breaking times. They also use the relevant techniques to study the times for doubly stochastic discrete-time evolutions to become mixed unitary.