We outline a new approach to the characterization as well as to the classification of positive maps. This approach is based on the facial structures of the set of states and of the cone of positive maps. In particular, the equivalence between Schroedinger's and Heisenberg's pictures is reviewed in this more general setting. Furthermore, we discuss in detail the structure of positive maps for two and three dimensional systems. In particular, the explicit form of decomposition of a positive map and the uniqueness of this decomposition for extremal positive maps for 2 dimensional case are described. The difference of the structure of positive maps between 2 dimensional and 3 dimensional cases is clarified. The resulting characterization of positive maps is applied to the study of quantum correlations and entanglement
Valid transformations between quantum states are necessarily described by completely positive maps, instead of just positive maps. Positive but not completely positive maps such as the transposition map cannot be implemented due to the existence of entanglement in composite quantum systems, but there are classes of states for which the positivity is guaranteed, e.g., states not correlated to other systems. this paper, we report on the concept of
N-copy extension of maps to quantitatively analyze the difference between positive maps and completely positive maps. We consider implementations of the action of positive but not completely positive maps on uncorrelated states by allowing an extra resource of consuming multiple copies of the input state and characterize the positive maps in terms of implementability with multiple copies. We show that by consuming multiple copies, the set of implementable positive maps becomes larger, and almost all positive maps are implementable with finite copies of an input state. The number of copies of the input state required to implement a positive map quantifies the degree by which a positive map violates complete positivity. We then analyze the optimal
N-copy implementability of a noisy version of the transposition map.