  The generalized amplitude damping channel (GADC) is one of the sources of
noise in superconducting-circuit-based quantum computing. It can be viewed as
the qubit analogue of the bosonic thermal channel, and it thus can be used to
model lossy processes in the presence of background noise for low-temperature
systems. In this work, we provide an information-theoretic study of the GADC.
We first determine the parameter range for which the GADC is entanglement
breaking and the range for which it is anti-degradable. We then establish
several upper bounds on its classical, quantum, and private capacities. These
bounds are based on data-processing inequalities and the uniform continuity of
information-theoretic quantities, as well as other techniques. Our upper bounds
on the quantum capacity of the GADC are tighter than the known upper bound
reported recently in [Rosati et al., Nat. Commun. 9, 4339 (2018)] for the
entire parameter range of the GADC, thus reducing the gap between the lower and
upper bounds. We also establish upper bounds on the two-way assisted quantum
and private capacities of the GADC. These bounds are based on the squashed
entanglement, and they are established by constructing particular squashing
channels. We compare these bounds with the max-Rains information bound, the
mutual information bound, and another bound based on approximate covariance.
For all capacities considered, we find that a large variety of techniques are
useful in establishing bounds.
