Volume of the space of qubit channels and some new results about the distribution of the quantum Dobrushin coefficient

Abstract: The simplest building blocks for quantum computations are the qbit-qbit quantum channels. In this paper we analyse the structure of these channels via their Choi representation. The restriction of a quantum channel to the space of classical states (i.e. probability distributions) is called the underlying classical channel. The structure of quantum channels over a fixed classical channel is studied, the volume of general and unital qubit channels over real and complex state spaces with respect to the Lebesgue measure is computed and explicit formulas are presented for the distribution of the volume of quantum channels over given classical channels. Moreover an algorithm is presented to generate uniformly distributed channels with respect to the Lebesgue measure, which enables further studies. With this algorithm the distribution of trace-distance contraction coefficient (Dobrushin) is investigated numerically by Monte-Carlo simulations, which leads to some conjectures and points out the strange behaviour of the real state space.