Symmetry-Enforced Quadratic Approximate-Degradability Bounds for Noisy Landau-Streater Channels

Abstract

Understanding the limits of quantum communication is a central problem in quantum information theory. Structural properties of quantum channels provide tools for analyzing these limits. In particular, approximate degradability links quantum-capacity bounds to the accuracy with which a channel's environment can be reconstructed from its output. We study this reconstruction problem for noisy Landau-Streater channels across finite-spin representations. For spin $j$ and noise probability $p$, we construct an explicit degrading map with diamond-norm error at most $[2+8/(j(j+1))]p^2\le (38/3)p^2$ on the common interval $0\le p\le 1/8$. A lower bound establishes quadratic order for this construction at each fixed spin. Floating-point semidefinite optimization places its error within $2.48\%$ of the numerical optimum on the sampled grid for four spins. Covariance and conditional-entropy concavity yield explicit two-sided quantum-capacity bounds for this family with a spin-uniform remainder. Building on the low-noise Pauli cancellation strategy, we formulate a sufficient condition based on a common scalar adjoint action on fixed, possibly nonunitary noise Kraus operators. The resulting reconstruction-error bound is uniform in system dimension and Kraus count. The criterion applies to irreducible $SU(N)$ generator channels and noisy Werner-Holevo channels, with the $SU(3)$ adjoint representation providing an example outside the mixed-unitary class.

arXiv comment13 pages, 1 figure. v6: Substantially revised, with explicit uniform bounds, a broader adjoint-action criterion, additional channel families, and numerical SDP comparisons. Submitted to Physical Review A