Notes on multiplicativity of maximal output purity for completely positive qubit maps

A problem in quantum information theory that has received considerable attention in recent years is the question of multiplicativity of the so-called maximal output purity (MOP) of a quantum channel. This quantity is defined as the maximum value of the purity one can get at the output of a channel by varying over all physical input states, when purity is measured by the Schatten q-norm, and is denoted by ν_q. The multiplicativity problem is the question whether two channels used in parallel have a combined ν_q that is the product of the ν_q of the two channels. A positive answer would imply a number of other additivity results in QIT. Very recently, P. Hayden has found counterexamples for every value of q>1. Nevertheless, these counterexamples require that the dimension of these channels increases with 1-q and therefore do not rule out multiplicativity for q in intervals [1,q₀) with q₀ depending on the channel dimension. I argue that this would be enough to prove additivity of entanglement of formation and of the classical capacity of quantum channels. More importantly, no counterexamples have as yet been found in the important special case where one of the channels is a qubit-channel, i.e. its input states are 2-dimensional. In this paper I focus attention to this qubit case and I rephrase the multiplicativity conjecture in the language of block matrices and prove the conjecture in a number of special cases.