  Dielectric four-port devices play an important role in optical quantum
information processing. Since for causality reasons the permittivity is a
complex function of frequency, dielectrics are typical examples of noisy
quantum channels, which cannot preserve quantum coherence. To study the effects
of quantum decoherence, we start from the quantized electromagnetic field in an
arbitrary Kramers--Kronig dielectric of given complex permittivity and
construct the transformation relating the output quantum state to the input
quantum state, without placing restrictions on the frequency. We apply the
formalism to some typical examples in quantum communication. In particular we
show that for entangled qubits the Bell-basis states $|\Psi^\pm>$ are more
robust against decoherence than the states $|\Phi^\pm>$.
