In recent times, there has been a growing scholarly focus on investigating the intricacies of quantum channel mixing. It has been commonly believed, based on intuition in the literature, that every generalized Pauli channel with dimensionality
d could be represented as a convex combination of
(d+1) generalized Pauli dephasing channels (see [Phys. Rev. A 103, 022605 (2021)] as a reference). To our surprise, our findings indicate the inaccuracy of this intuitive perspective. This has stimulated our interest in exploring the properties of convex combinations of generalized Pauli channels, beyond the restriction to just
(d+1) generalized Pauli dephasing channels. We demonstrate that many previously established properties still hold within this broader context. For instance, any mixture of invertible generalized Pauli channels retains its invertibility. It's worth noting that this property doesn't hold when considering the Weyl channels setting. Additionally, we demonstrate that every Pauli channel (for the case of
d=2) can be represented as a mixture of
(d+1) Pauli dephasing channels, but this generalization doesn't apply to higher dimensions. This highlights a fundamental distinction between qubit and general qudit cases. In contrast to prior understanding, we show that non-invertibility of mixed channels is not a prerequisite for the resulting mapping to constitute a Markovian semigroup.
We analyze the geometry of the generalized Pauli channels constructed from the mutually unbiased bases. The Choi-Jamio\l{}kowski isomorphism allows us to express the Hilbert-Schmidt line and volume elements in terms of the eigenvalues of the generalized Pauli maps. After determining appropriate regions of integration, we analytically compute the volume of generalized Pauli channels and their important subclasses. In particular, we obtain the volumes of the generalized Pauli channels that can be generated by a legitimate generator and are entanglement breaking. We also provide the upper bound for the volume of positive, trace-preserving generalized Pauli maps. This helps us to better understand the structure of high-dimensional sets of quantum channels.
We propose a parameter estimation protocol for generalized Pauli channels acting on d -dimensional Hilbert space. The salient features of the proposed method include product probe states and measurements, the number of measurement configurations linear in d , minimal post-processing, and the scaling of the mean square error comparable to that of the entanglement-based parameter estimation scheme for generalized Pauli channels. We also show that while measuring generalized Pauli operators the errors caused by the Pauli noise can be modeled as measurement errors. This makes it possible to utilize the measurement error mitigation framework to mitigate the errors caused by the generalized Pauli channels. We use this result to mitigate noise on the probe states and recover the scaling of the noiseless probes, except with a noise strength-dependent constant factor. This method of modeling Pauli channel as measurement noise can also be of independent interest in other NISQ tasks, e.g., state tomography problems, variational quantum algorithms, and other channel estimation problems where Pauli measurements have the central role.