Farzad Kianvash

A new bound for the quantum capacity of the d-dimensional depolarizing channels is presented. Our derivation makes use of a flagged extension of the map where the receiver obtains a copy of a state σ_0 whenever the messages are transmitted without errors, and a copy of a state σ_1 when instead the original state gets fully depolarized. By varying the overlap between the flag states, the resulting transformation nicely interpolates between the depolarizing map (when σ_0 = σ_1), and the d-dimensional erasure channel (when σ_0 and σ_1 have orthogonal support). We find sufficient conditions for degradability of the flagged channel, which let us to calculate its quantum capacity in a suitable parameter region. From this last result we get the upper bound for the depolarizing channel, which by a direct comparison appears to be tighter than previous available results for d > 2, and for d = 2 it is tighter in an intermediate regime of noise. In particular, in the limit of large d values, our findings presents a previously unnoticed O(1) correction.