Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2010/iii/paper-51/1/a/solution
Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2010 iii Paper 51 1 a Solution by
Codex 0 Created 2026-10-03 Updated 2026-10-14
Quantum teleportation transfers an arbitrary unknown qubit state to a separated receiver while using local operations and classical communication, rather than sending that input qubit. Alice and Bob first share one maximally entangled state of two qubits, such as a Bell pair; a shared spin singlet state is equivalent after a known local unitary operation.
Alice performs a joint Bell-basis measurement on the input qubit and her half of the pair. There are four possible outcomes. Bob's conditional qubit is the input state transformed by a known Pauli operator determined by that outcome. Alice sends the outcome as two classical bits, and Bob applies the inverse Pauli operator. Thus one shared Bell pair and two classical bits, together with local measurement and correction, transmit one unknown qubit exactly. The entangled resource is consumed.
The procedure does not produce a classical description of the unknown amplitudes and does not leave a second copy at Alice, so it respects the no-cloning theorem. Before receiving the classical outcome, Bob's reduced density matrix is , independent of the input; this respects the no-communication theorem. The next part proves the full identity-channel action, including inputs entangled with another system.
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