Abstract
Teleportation of a quantum state encompasses the complete transfer of information from one particle to another. The complete specification of the quantum state of a system generally requires an infinite amount of information, even for simple two-level systems (qubits). Moreover, the principles of quantum mechanics dictate that any measurement on a system immediately alters its state, while yielding at most one bit of information. The transfer of a state from one system to another (by performing measurements on the first and operations on the second) might therefore appear impossible. However, it has been shown1 that the entangling properties of quantum mechanics, in combination with classical communication, allow quantum-state teleportation to be performed. Teleportation using pairs of entangled photons has been demonstrated2,3,4,5,6, but such techniques are probabilistic, requiring post-selection of measured photons. Here, we report deterministic quantum-state teleportation between a pair of trapped calcium ions. Following closely the original proposal1, we create a highly entangled pair of ions and perform a complete Bell-state measurement involving one ion from this pair and a third source ion. State reconstruction conditioned on this measurement is then performed on the other half of the entangled pair. The measured fidelity is 75%, demonstrating unequivocally the quantum nature of the process.
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Acknowledgements
We thank H. Briegel and P. Zoller for a critical reading of the manuscript. We gratefully acknowledge support by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), by the European Commission (QUEST, QUBITS and QGATES networks), by the Institut für Quanteninformation, and by the Los Alamos LDRD Program. This material is based upon work supported in part by the US Army Research Office. H.H is funded by the Marie-Curie program of the European Union.
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Riebe, M., Häffner, H., Roos, C. et al. Deterministic quantum teleportation with atoms. Nature 429, 734–737 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature02570
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nature02570
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