Log-singularities for studying capacities of quantum channels.

A small linear increase from zero in some eigenvalue of a density operator makes the derivative of its von-Neumann entropy logarithmic. We call this logarithmic derivative a $\log$-singularity and use it develop methods for checking non-additivity and positivity of the coherent information $\mathcal{Q}^{(1)}$ of a noisy quantum channel. One concrete application of our method leads to a novel type of non-additivity where a zero quantum capacity qubit amplitude damping channel in parallel with a simple qutrit channel is shown to have larger $\mathcal{Q}^{(1)}$ than the sum of $\mathcal{Q}^{(1)}$'s of the two individual channels. Another application shows that any noisy quantum channel has positive $\mathcal{Q}^{(1)}$ if its output dimension is larger than its complementary output (environment) dimension and this environment dimension equals the rank of some output state obtained from a pure input state. Special cases of this result prove $\mathcal{Q}^{(1)}$ is positive for a variety of channels, including the complement of a qubit channel, and a large family of incomplete erasure channels where the positivity of $\mathcal{Q}^{(1)}$ comes as a surprise.