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Quantum teleportation with independent sources and prior entanglement distribution over a network

Nature Photonics volume 10, pages 671–675 (2016)Cite this article

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Abstract

Quantum teleportation1 faithfully transfers a quantum state between distant nodes in a network, which enables revolutionary information-processing applications2,3,4. This has motivated a tremendous amount of research activity5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23,24. However, in the past not a single quantum-teleportation experiment has been realized with independent quantum sources, entanglement distribution prior to the Bell-state measurement (BSM) and feedforward operation simultaneously, even in the laboratory environment. We take the challenge and report the construction of a 30 km optical-fibre-based quantum network distributed over a 12.5 km area. This network is robust against noise in the real world with active stabilization strategies, which allows us to realize quantum teleportation with all the ingredients simultaneously. Both the quantum-state and process-tomography measurements and an independent statistical hypothesis test confirm the quantum nature of the quantum teleportation over this network. Our experiment marks a critical step towards the realization of a global ‘quantum internet’ in the real world.

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Figure 1: Schematics of a quantum network with a star-topology structure.
Figure 2: Quantum teleportation in a Hefei optical fibre network.
Figure 3: State fidelities of quantum teleportation with four different input states: |t0〉, |t1〉, |D〉 and |R〉.
Figure 4: Quantum-process tomography of quantum teleportation.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to the staff of the QuantumCTek. We thank Y. Liu, H. Lu, P. Xu, Y.-P. Wu, Y.-L. Tang, X. Ma, X. Xie, Y.-A.C. and C.-Z.P. for discussions, and C. Liu for helping with artwork design. This work was supported by the National Fundamental Research Program (under Grant No. 2013CB336800), the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Chinese Academy of Science.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at Microscale and Department of Modern Physics, Shanghai Branch, University of Science and Technology of China, Shanghai, 201315, China

    Qi-Chao Sun, Ya-Li Mao, Yang-Fan Jiang, Xiao Jiang, Teng-Yun Chen, Jing-Yun Fan, Qiang Zhang & Jian-Wei Pan

  2. CAS Center for Excellence and Synergetic Innovation Center in Quantum Information and Quantum Physics, Shanghai Branch, University of Science and Technology of China, Shanghai, 201315, China

    Qi-Chao Sun, Ya-Li Mao, Yang-Fan Jiang, Xiao Jiang, Teng-Yun Chen, Jing-Yun Fan, Qiang Zhang & Jian-Wei Pan

  3. Department of Physics and Astronomy, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China

    Qi-Chao Sun & Xian-Feng Chen

  4. State Key Laboratory of Functional Materials for Informatics, Shanghai Institute of Microsystem and Information Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai, 200050, China

    Si-Jing Chen, Wei-Jun Zhang, Li-Xing You & Zhen Wang

  5. Department of Electronic Engineering, Tsinghua National Laboratory for Information Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Wei Zhang

  6. Institute for Quantum Computing and Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, N2L 3G1, Ontario, Canada

    Yan-Bao Zhang

  7. Advanced ICT Research Institute, National Institute of Information and Communications Technology, 588-2, Iwaoka, Nishi-ku, Kobe, Hyogo, 651-2492, Japan

    Shigehito Miki, Taro Yamashita & Hirotaka Terai

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  1. Qi-Chao Sun
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Contributions

Q.Z. and J.-W.P. conceived and designed the experiments, S.-J.C., W.-J.Z., S.M., T.Y., H.T., L.-X.Y. and Z.W. fabricated and characterized the SNSPDs, Q.-C.S. and W.Z. designed and characterized the photon sources, Q.-C.S., Y.-L.M. and Y.-F.J. carried out the field test, X.J.,T.-Y.C. and X.-F.C. provided experimental assistance, Q.-C.S., Y.-B.Z. and J.-Y.F. analysed the data, Q.-C.S., X.-F.C., J.-Y.F., Q.Z. and J.-W.P. wrote the manuscript with input from all authors and Q.Z. and J.-W.P. supervised the whole project.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Qiang Zhang or Jian-Wei Pan.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Sun, QC., Mao, YL., Chen, SJ. et al. Quantum teleportation with independent sources and prior entanglement distribution over a network. Nature Photon 10, 671–675 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2016.179

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