We investigate entanglement transmission over an unknown channel in the
presence of a third party (called the adversary), which is enabled to choose
the channel from a given set of memoryless but non-stationary channels without
informing the legitimate sender and receiver about the particular choice that
he made. This channel model is called arbitrarily varying quantum channel
(AVQC). We derive a quantum version of Ahlswede's dichotomy for classical
arbitrarily varying channels. This includes a regularized formula for the
common randomness-assisted capacity for entanglement transmission of an AVQC.
Quite surprisingly and in contrast to the classical analog of the problem
involving the maximal and average error probability, we find that the capacity
for entanglement transmission of an AVQC always equals its strong subspace
transmission capacity. These results are accompanied by different notions of
symmetrizability (zero-capacity conditions) as well as by conditions for an
AVQC to have a capacity described by a single-letter formula. In he final part
of the paper the capacity of the erasure-AVQC is computed and some light shed
on the connection between AVQCs and zero-error capacities. Additionally, we
show by entirely elementary and operational arguments motivated by the theory
of AVQCs that the quantum, classical, and entanglement-assisted zero-error
capacities of quantum channels are generically zero and are discontinuous at
every positivity point.Comment: 49 pages, no figures, final version of our papers arXiv:1010.0418v2
and arXiv:1010.0418. Published "Online First" in Communications in
Mathematical Physics, 201