Information Fragility or Robustness Under Quantum Channels

Quantum states naturally decay under noise. Many earlier works have quantified and demonstrated lower bounds on the decay rate, showing exponential decay in a wide variety of contexts. Here we study the converse question: are there uniform upper bounds on the ratio of post-noise to initial information quantities when noise is sufficiently weak? In several scenarios, including classical, we find multiplicative converse bounds. However, this is not always the case. Even for simple noise such as qubit dephasing or depolarizing, mutual information may fall by an unbounded factor under arbitrarily weak noise. As an application, we find families of channels with non-zero private capacity despite arbitrarily high probability of transmitting an arbitrarily good copy of the input to the environment.