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Deterministic quantum teleportation of photonic quantum bits by a hybrid technique

Nature volume 500, pages 315–318 (2013)Cite this article

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Abstract

Quantum teleportation1 allows for the transfer of arbitrary unknown quantum states from a sender to a spatially distant receiver, provided that the two parties share an entangled state and can communicate classically. It is the essence of many sophisticated protocols for quantum communication and computation2,3,4,5. Photons are an optimal choice for carrying information in the form of ‘flying qubits’, but the teleportation of photonic quantum bits6,7,8,9,10,11 (qubits) has been limited by experimental inefficiencies and restrictions. Main disadvantages include the fundamentally probabilistic nature of linear-optics Bell measurements12, as well as the need either to destroy the teleported qubit or attenuate the input qubit when the detectors do not resolve photon numbers13. Here we experimentally realize fully deterministic quantum teleportation of photonic qubits without post-selection. The key step is to make use of a hybrid technique involving continuous-variable teleportation14,15,16 of a discrete-variable, photonic qubit. When the receiver’s feedforward gain is optimally tuned, the continuous-variable teleporter acts as a pure loss channel17,18, and the input dual-rail-encoded qubit, based on a single photon, represents a quantum error detection code against photon loss19 and hence remains completely intact for most teleportation events. This allows for a faithful qubit transfer even with imperfect continuous-variable entangled states: for four qubits the overall transfer fidelities range from 0.79 to 0.82 and all of them exceed the classical limit of teleportation. Furthermore, even for a relatively low level of the entanglement, qubits are teleported much more efficiently than in previous experiments, albeit post-selectively (taking into account only the qubit subspaces), and with a fidelity comparable to the previously reported values.

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Figure 1: Experimental set-up.
Figure 2: Experimental density matrices.
Figure 3: Experimental results of teleportation including gain tuning.

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Acknowledgements

This work was partly supported by PDIS, GIA, G-COE, APSA and FIRST, commissioned by MEXT (Japan); by the SCOPE programme commissioned by MIC (Japan); and by ASCR-JSPS. S.T. and M.F. acknowledge financial support from ALPS. We thank L. Mišta Jr, H. Yonezawa and J. Kimble for comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Applied Physics, School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8656, Japan,

    Shuntaro Takeda, Takahiro Mizuta, Maria Fuwa & Akira Furusawa

  2. Institute of Physics, Johannes-Gutenberg Universität Mainz, Staudingerweg 7, 55128 Mainz, Germany,

    Peter van Loock

Authors
  1. Shuntaro Takeda
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  2. Takahiro Mizuta
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  3. Maria Fuwa
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  4. Peter van Loock
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  5. Akira Furusawa
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Contributions

A.F. planned and supervised the project. P.v.L. and S.T. theoretically defined the scientific goals. S.T. and T.M. designed and performed the experiment, and acquired the data. S.T. and M.F. developed the electronic devices. S.T., T.M. and M.F. analysed the data. S.T. and P.v.L. wrote the manuscript with assistance from all other co-authors.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Akira Furusawa.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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This file contains a Supplementary Discussion, Supplementary Data, Supplementary References, Supplementary Figures 1-2 and Supplementary Tables 1-2. (PDF 1994 kb)

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Takeda, S., Mizuta, T., Fuwa, M. et al. Deterministic quantum teleportation of photonic quantum bits by a hybrid technique. Nature 500, 315–318 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature12366

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