Dephasing channel

A dephasing channel suppresses off-diagonal entries of a density matrix in a preferred basis while preserving quantum state populations. Complete dephasing is identical to a projective measurement in that basis with its outcome discarded.

For the Bell correlations versus a classical mixture example, completely dephasing Alice's qubit in the computational basis maps ${\rho }_{\mathrm{Bell}}$ to ${\rho }_{\mathrm{mix}}$. It preserves their perfect $Z$ agreement and each reduced density matrix, yet destroys the $X$ correlation. This is why testing only populations can miss damage to a quantum memory: the stored quantum coherence may have disappeared while every preferred-basis measurement still looks correct. The joint Von Neumann entropy rises from zero to one bit, although each local entropy stays fixed.

An environment interaction preserving the computational populations multiplies a qubit's upper off-diagonal density entry by $\overline{c}$. A real phase-flip channel representation exists for every input precisely when $c$ is real, with probability $(1-c)/2$. For $c=r{e}^{i\phi }$, the channel is a phase-flip channel of probability $(1-r)/2$ followed by the diagonal unitary operator $\mathrm{diag}(1,e^{i\phi })$. The coherent phase cannot be discarded just because the populations are unchanged.