Stable Subspaces of Positive Maps of Matrix Algebras

We study stable subspaces of positive extremal maps of finite dimensional matrix algebras that preserve trace and matrix identity (so-called bistochastic maps). We have established the existence of the isometric-sweeping decomposition for such maps. As the main result of the paper, we have shown that all extremal bistochastic maps acting on the algebra of matrices of size 3×3 fall into one of the three possible categories, depending on the form of the stable subspace of the isometric-sweeping decomposition. Our example of an extremal atomic positive map seems to be the first one that handles the case of that subspace being non-trivial. Lastly, we compute the entanglement witness associated with the extremal map and specify a large family of entangled states detected by it.