Concurrence versus purity: Influence of local channels on Bell states of two qubits

We analyze how a maximally entangled state of two qubits (e.g., the singlet ψ_s) is affected by the action of local channels described by completely positive maps E. We analyze the concurrence and the purity of states ϱ_E=E⊗I[ψ_s]. Using the concurrence-versus-purity phase diagram we characterize local channels E by their action on the singlet state ψ_s. We specify a region of the concurrence-versus-purity diagram that is achievable from the singlet state via the action of unital channels. We show that even the most general (including nonunital) local channels acting just on a single qubit of the original singlet state cannot generate the maximally entangled mixed states. We study in detail various time evolutions of the original singlet state induced by local Markovian semigroups. We show that the decoherence process is represented in the concurrence-versus-purity diagram by a line that forms the lower bound of the achievable region for unital maps. On the other hand, the depolarization process is represented by a line that forms the upper bound of the region of maps induced by unital maps.