Additivity for unital qubit channels

Additivity of the Holevo capacity is proved for product channels, under the condition that one of the channels is a unital qubit channel, with the other completely arbitrary. As a byproduct this proves that the Holevo bound is the classical information capacity of such qubit channels, and provides an explicit formula for this classical capacity. Additivity of minimal entropy and multiplicativity of p-norms are also proved under the same assumptions. The proof relies on a new bound for the p-norm of an output state from the half-noisy phase-damping channel. (C) 2002 American Institute of Physics.