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arXiv:2512.23598

On regions of mixed unitarity for semigroups of unital quantum channels

B V Rajarama Bhat, Repana Devendra

Published Dec 29, 2025• 0 citations
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Abstract

It is established that both discrete and continuous semigroups of unital quantum channels are eventually mixed unitary. This result is novel even for the subclass of Schur maps and stands in sharp contrast to the resolution of the asymptotic quantum Birkhoff conjecture by Haagerup and Musat, who demonstrated that tensor powers of some unital quantum channels maintain a persistent positive distance from the set of mixed unitary channels. Remarkably, our results show that this gap vanishes in finite time when considering ordinary powers within a semigroup. Building on this, we define the mixed unitary index of a unital quantum channel as the minimum time (or power) beyond which all subsequent maps become mixed unitary. We demonstrate that for any fixed dimension $d \geq 3$, there is no universal upper bound for this index. Furthermore, we observe that if a continuous semigroup is not mixed unitary at some $t > 0$, it remains non-mixed unitary for all $t$ sufficiently close to the origin. Finally, we investigate quantum dynamical semigroups where mixed unitarity is restricted to specific families, such as Weyl or diagonal unitaries. We show that Schur semigroups of correlation matrices eventually become mixtures of rank-one correlation matrices, and we characterize the generators of Schur semigroups that remain within this set for all $t \geq 0$.

DOI
10.48550/arxiv.2512.23598

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Unital quantum channels, defined by their property of leaving the maximally mixed state invariant, form an important class of quantum operations. A distinguished subset of these channels can be represented as a probabilistic mixture of unitary evolutions. Characterizing channels that do not admit such a decomposition is in general a hard problem with significant implications for noise mitigation in quantum technologies and for fundamental problems in quantum information theory. Here we establish a link between mixed-unitarity of unital channels and the (quantum) nature of the memory effects in non-Markovian dynamics. Translating the problem into the language of process tensors, this connection yields a hierarchy of semidefinite programs that provides numerically efficient witnesses for non-mixed-unitary behavior, outperforming existing criteria. We demonstrate the power of this approach through illustrative examples of unital channels in dimensions three and four, and show how the method can detect non-mixed-unitary behavior based on incomplete channel tomography.
Abstract We establish an operator algebra generalization of Watrous’ theorem (Watrous 2009 Quantum Inf. Comput. 9 403–413) on mixing unital quantum channels (completely positive trace-preserving maps) with the completely depolarizing channel, wherein the more general objects of focus become (finite-dimensional) von Neumann algebras, the unique trace preserving conditional expectation onto the algebra, the group of unitary operators in the commutant of the algebra, and the fixed point algebra of the channel. As an application, we obtain a result on the asymptotic theory of quantum channels, showing that all unital channels are eventually mixed unitary. We also discuss the special case of the diagonal algebra in detail, and draw connections to the theory of correlation matrices and Schur product maps.
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We analyze the set ANQ of mixed unitary channels represented in the Weyl basis and accessible by a Lindblad semigroup acting on an N-level quantum system. General necessary and sufficient conditions for a mixed Weyl quantum channel of an arbitrary dimension to be accessible by a semigroup are established. The set ANQ is shown to be log-convex and star-shaped with respect to the completely depolarizing channel. A decoherence supermap acting in the space of Lindblad operators transforms them into the space of Kolmogorov generators of classical semigroups. We show that for mixed Weyl channels, the super-decoherence commutes with the dynamics so that decohering a quantum accessible channel, we obtain a bistochastic matrix from the set ANC of classical maps accessible by a semigroup. Focusing on three-level systems, we investigate the geometry of the sets of quantum accessible maps, its classical counterpart, and the support of their spectra. We demonstrate that the set A3Q is not included in the set U3Q of quantum unistochastic channels, although an analogous relation holds for N = 2. The set of transition matrices obtained by super-decoherence of unistochastic channels of order N ≥ 3 is shown to be larger than the set of unistochastic matrices of this order and yields a motivation to introduce the larger sets of k-unistochastic matrices.
Abstract In this paper, we consider the convex structure of the set of unital quantum channels. To do this, we introduce a novel framework to construct and characterise different families of low-rank unital quantum maps. In this framework, unital quantum maps are represented as a set of complex parameters on which we impose a set of constraints. The different families of unital maps are obtained by mapping those parameters into the operator representation of a quantum map. For these families, we also introduce a scalar measuring their distance to the set of mixed-unitary maps. We consider the particular case of qutrit channels which is the smallest set of maps for which the existence of non-unitary extremal maps is known. In this setting, we show how our framework generalises the description of well-known maps such as the antisymmetric Werner–Holevo map but also novel families of qutrit maps.