Minimal entropy of states emerging from noisy quantum channels

We consider the minimal entropy of qubit states transmitted through two uses of a noisy quantum channel, which is modeled by the action of a completely positive trace-preserving (or stochastic) map. We provide strong support for the conjecture that this minimal entropy is additive, namely, that the minimum entropy can be achieved when product states are transmitted. Explicitly, we prove that for a tensor product of two unital stochastic maps on qubit states, using an entanglement that involves only states which emerge with minimal entropy cannot decrease the entropy below the minimum achievable using product states. We give a separate argument, based on the geometry of the image of the set of density matrices under stochastic maps, which suggests that the minimal entropy conjecture holds for nonunital as well as for unital maps. We also show that the maximal norm of the output states is multiplicative for most product maps on n-qubit states, including all those for which at least one map is unital. For the class of unital channels on C/sup 2/, we show that additivity of minimal entropy implies that the Holevo (see IEEE Trans. Inform. Theory, vol.44, p.269-73, 1998 and Russian Math. Surv., p.1295-1331, 1999) capacity of the channel is additive over two inputs, achievable with orthogonal states, and equal to the Shannon capacity. This implies that superadditivity of the capacity is possible only for nonunital channels.