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The Bell basis diagonalizes the commuting Pauli operators $Z\otimes Z$ and $X\otimes X$. Two local anticommutations make the joint operators commute. Their signs encode parity and relative phase. The displayed projectors turn the signed eigenvalues into literal zero-or-one bit eigenvalues: even parity and plus phase have bit zero.

Apply a Hadamard gate to qubit $A$, followed by a controlled-NOT gate with $A$ controlling $B$. The resulting Bell-basis conversion circuit is $U=\mathrm{CNOT}(H\otimes I)$ and givesThus $00,01,10,11$ map respectively to ${\Phi }^{+},{\Psi }^{+},{\Phi }^{-},{\Psi }^{-}$. The first input bit becomes the phase bit and the second becomes the parity bit.

Both gates are self-inverse, but inversion of their product reverses the order:So the same two gates convert the Bell basis back to the computational basis when applied in reverse order: first the controlled-NOT, then the Hadamard. Using the forward order twice does not generally work, since these gates do not commute. For example, $U|{\Phi }^{+}⟩=(|00⟩+|01⟩-|10⟩+|11⟩)/2$, which is not a computational-basis state.

The Bell basis consists ofLet $Z={\sigma }_z$, $X={\sigma }_x$. The Pauli operators $Z\otimes Z$ and $X\otimes X$ commute: each of the two local anticommutations contributes a minus sign, so they cancel. Their eigenvalue table isTo make the bit values literally zero or one rather than signed eigenvalues, the commuting Bell parity and phase observables areThey distinguish all four states jointly. The parity bit records whether the computational bits agree; the phase bit records the relative sign.

Write the arbitrary joint pure state of the input $A$ and an external reference $R$ asThe reference vectors need not be normalized or orthogonal. Share $|{\Phi }^{+}{⟩}_{aB}$. Label Alice's Bell states byProjecting onto this Bell basis gives the unnormalized stateEach outcome has probability $1/4$. Alice sends $(r,s)$ and Bob applies $Z_B^r{X}_B^s$, reversing the two Pauli gates. The final state is exactly $|\Omega {⟩}_{BR}$ for every outcome. In particular all input entanglement and other correlations with $R$ now belong to $B$, while the reference marginal is unchanged. This is teleportation as an identity channel on a reference.

Conditioned on the record, Alice's two measured carriers are in $|{\beta }_{rs}⟩$ and factor from $BR$. Thus $A$ no longer retains its original correlations with $R$. There is no second copy, even when the teleported qubit was initially entangled with a larger system.