A pretty-tight converse on the classical capacity of generalized amplitude-damping channels

Abstract

The classical capacity of a quantum channel is the highest rate at which classical information can be transmitted with vanishing error. Although the capacities of many fundamental quantum channels have been established, the capacity of the generalized amplitude-damping channel remains an open problem in quantum Shannon theory. In this work, we revisit a converse bound introduced by Brandão et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 106, 230502 (2011)], which upper-bounds the classical capacity in terms of a correlation measure. For the generalized amplitude-damping channel, we derive a relaxation of this measure that makes the converse bound efficiently computable. Numerical comparisons demonstrate that our bound is pretty tight in general and nearly coincides with the Holevo information at nonzero temperatures, significantly improving upon existing bounds across the entire parameter range.