Entanglement-annihilating and entanglement-breaking channels

Abstract: We introduce and investigate a family of entanglement-annihilating channels. These channels are capable of destroying any quantum entanglement within the system they act on. We show that they are not necessarily entanglement breaking. In order to achieve this result we analyze the subset of locally entanglement-annihilating channels. In this case, the same local noise applied on each subsystem individually is less entanglement annihilating (with respect to multi-partite entanglement) as the number of subsystems is increasing. Therefore, the bipartite case provides restrictions on the set of local entanglement-annihilating channels for the multipartite case. The introduced concepts are illustrated on the family of single-qubit depolarizing channels.