Teleportation as a Depolarizing Quantum Channel, Relative Entropy, and Classical Capacity

We show that standard teleportation with an arbitrary mixed state resource is equivalent to a generalized depolarizing channel with probabilities given by the maximally entangled components of the resource. This enables the usage of any quantum channel as a generalized depolarizing channel without additional twirling operations. It also provides a nontrivial upper bound on the entanglement of a class of mixed states. Our result allows a consistent and statistically motivated quantification of teleportation success in terms of the relative entropy and this quantification can be related to a classical capacity.