Structural physical approximations of unphysical maps and generalized quantum measurements

Abstract

We investigate properties of the structural physical approximation (SPA) of the partial transposition map recently introduced by Horodecki and Ekert [quant-ph/0111064]. We focus on the case of two-qubit states and show that in this case the map has the structure of a generalized quantum measurement followed by preparation of a suitable output state. We also introduce SPA for map that transforms two copies of density matrix of a single qubit onto a square of that matrix. We prove that also this map is essentially a generalized quantum measurement.