Optimal decomposition of incoherent qubit channel

Abstract

We show that any incoherent qubit channel could be decomposed into four incoherent Kraus operators. The proof consists in showing existence of four incoherent Kraus operators by decomposing the corresponding Choi-Jamio\l{}kowski-Sudarshan matrix. We mention some applications of this optimal decomposition. We also show that the Kraus rank and incoherent rank are different even for qubit channel.