Entanglement Breaking Rank and the existence of SIC POVMs

Abstract

We introduce and study the entanglement breaking rank of an entanglement breaking channel. We show that the entanglement breaking rank of the channel $\mathfrak Z: M_d \to M_d$ defined by \begin{align*} \mathfrak Z(X) = \frac{1}{d+1}(X+\text{Tr}(X)\mathbb I_d) \end{align*} is $d^2$ if and only if there exists a symmetric informationally-complete POVM in dimension $d$.