Incompatibility of quantum channels

Two quantum channels are called compatible if they can be obtained as marginals from a single broadcasting channel; otherwise they are incompatible. We derive a characterization of the compatibility relation in terms of concatenation and conjugation, and we show that all pairs of sufficiently noisy quantum channels are compatible. The complement relation of incompatibility can be seen as a unifying aspect for many quantum features. We demonstrate that several phenomena, such as impossibility of universal broadcasting and unavoidable measurement disturbance, appear naturally in this framework.