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    Quantum channel masking

    Anna Honeycutt*

    Hailey Murray†

    Eric Chitambar‡

    • *Contact author: annagh2@illinois.edu
    • †Contact author: hm649@cornell.edu
    • ‡Contact author: echitamb@illinois.edu

    Phys. Rev. A 113, 042457 – Published 27 April, 2026

    DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/5r9z-k5qn

    Abstract

    Quantum masking is a special type of secret sharing in which some information gets reversibly distributed into a multipartite system, leaving the original information inaccessible to each subsystem. This paper proposes a dynamical extension of quantum masking to the level of quantum channels. In channel masking, the identity of a channel becomes locally hidden but still globally accessible after its output is sent through a bipartite broadcasting channel. We first characterize all families of d-dimensional unitaries that can be isometrically masked, a condition that holds even in the presence of depolarizing noise. For the case of qubits, we identify which families of Pauli channels can be masked, and we prove that a qubit channel can be masked against the identity if and only if it is unital and has a pure-state fixed point. Masking against the identity describes a scenario in which channel noise becomes completely delocalized through a broadcast map and undetectable through subsystem dynamics alone.

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