Noisy Landau-Streater and Werner-Holevo channels in arbitrary dimensions

Two important classes of quantum channels, namely, the Werner-Holevo and the Landau-Streater channels, are known to be related only in three dimensions, i.e., when acting on qutrits. In this work, the definition of the Landau-Streater channel is extended in such a way that it retains its equivalence to the Werner-Holevo channel in all dimensions. This channel is then modified to be representable as a model of noise acting on qudits. We then investigate properties of the resulting noisy channel and determine the conditions under which it cannot be the result of a Markovian evolution. Furthermore, we investigate its different capacities for transmitting classical and quantum information with or without entanglement. In particular, while the pure (or high-noise) Landau-Streater or the Werner-Holevo channel is entanglement breaking and hence has zero capacity, by finding a lower bound for the quantum capacity, we show that when the level of noise is lower than a critical value the quantum capacity will be nonzero. Surprisingly, this value turns out to be approximately equal to 0.4 in all dimensions. Finally, we show that, in even dimensions, this channel has a decomposition in terms of unitary operations. This is in contrast with the three-dimensional, case where it has been proved that such a decomposition is impossible, even in terms of other quantum maps.