Convex decomposition of dimension-altering quantum channels

Abstract: Quantum channels, which are completely positive and trace preserving mappings, can alter the dimension of a system; e.g., a quantum channel from a qubit to a qutrit. We study the convex set properties of dimension-altering quantum channels, and particularly the channel decomposition problem in terms of convex sum of extreme channels. We provide various quantum circuit representations of extreme and generalized extreme channels, which can be employed in an optimization to approximately decompose an arbitrary channel. Numerical simulations of low-dimensional channels are performed to demonstrate our channel decomposition scheme.