The optical success probability of a fourfold GHZ source depends on the photon-number statistics of the assumed two-pair input. Let be the probability that arm contains one and one , given two pairs. The beam splitter then puts one of the two photons into each output with probability , and the final polarization-parity selection succeeds with probability . With ideal photodetectors,
For the normalized, fully overlapping two-pair component of polarization-entangled down-conversion used above, , so the squared norm of the accepted component gives . Treating the two emissions instead as independently labelled Bell pairs gives the commonly used bookkeeping estimate and . This is a different pair-statistics approximation; it must not be obtained by dropping labels from an input state without renormalizing it. Genuine GHZ state coherence additionally requires erasing information about the pair of origin.
Let be the two-pair probability per pulse and the pulse repetition rate. The coincidence rate is . With the usual order-of-magnitude estimate , the supplied and give . The fully overlapping model gives , about one event per twelve seconds; independent-pair bookkeeping gives , about one per eight seconds. Thus the estimate is of order under these idealizations.
An exact prefactor cannot follow from the single-pair probability alone. For example, the pair-number statistics of polarization-entangled down-conversion in a single collected mode pair give at weak gain, and hence with . Multiple temporal or spectral modes change those statistics. Real collection losses and detector efficiencies further reduce the rate; they are excluded by the ideal calculation.
The extra Pauli gate on the control is removed by . Conjugating the target by a Hadamard gate then gives
Thus, from left to right in the network, apply , then , then and ; the last two gates commute.
Figure 1.
Synthesis of a CNOT gate from the ion gate , and preparation of a Bell pair
. Details.
For a direct proof, the control-zero block of is and its control-one block is . Multiplication by changes the latter into . Since and , the result is
which is exactly the CNOT gate on all inputs, including quantum superpositions.
A bipartite pure state is entangled when it cannot be written . For mixed states, the corresponding definition excludes every convex mixture of product states, not just a single product state.
Apply a Hadamard gate to ion , followed by the CNOT gate of part (d):
The lower network in the figure shows this Bell pair preparation. Either ion alone has reduced density matrix , whereas the joint quantum state is pure; hence the joint quantum state cannot be a product state. The entangling operation can be expanded into exactly as above.
A measurement in quantum mechanics with outcomes is specified, in the single-operator-per-outcome description, by linear operators satisfying . Its effects form a positive operator-valued measure. The two measurement postulates are the Born rule for outcomes and the conditional state update:
For a density operator the corresponding formulas are and . More general quantum instruments have multiple operators for each outcome and sum these terms. For a projective measurement of an observable , take ; the outcome value is and the postmeasurement state lies in its eigenspace. A POVM alone specifies probabilities, whereas the measurement operators or instrument also specify the backaction.
For quantum teleportation, Alice and Bob initially share the Bell pair . Alice also holds the input , with . The shared entanglement is a resource; the two transmitted classical bits alone could not transfer an arbitrary unknown quantum state.
Alice applies a controlled-NOT gate with as control and as target, then a Hadamard gate to . Starting from , direct expansion gives
For example, the four receiver vectors are , , , and . Thus the gate calculation fixes the ordering of the Pauli corrections, including the last branch's sign.
Alice measures in the computational basis, obtaining . The Born rule gives each outcome probability , independent of the input amplitudes. Bob's normalized conditional state is . Alice sends the two outcome bits. Bob applies the inverse, , and hence
The same circuit is a Bell-basis measurement on Alice's two qubits, expressed using ordinary gates followed by computational-basis measurements. It restores the state without Alice or Bob knowing .
By linearity, the calculation also holds when the input is entangled with a reference: each outcome has branch map , and after correction every branch is one-half of the identity map. Summing the four corrected density operators gives exactly the original input density operator, with all reference correlations preserved. This is teleportation as an identity channel on a reference. Without the two classical bits Bob must average the four uncorrected states, giving , so the process cannot signal before the message arrives. The Bell pair is consumed and Alice retains no copy of the unknown state, in accordance with the no-cloning theorem.
Under the intended assumption that one use of the quantum channel transmits one qubit without noise, Alice can communicate two classical bits with certainty if she and Bob already share a Bell pair. She uses superdense coding. The prior distribution of the Bell pair must be a resource available before the permitted channel use; distributing it through that same channel would consume another use.
Take the shared Bell state to be , with Alice holding the first qubit. For a two-bit message , Alice applies the local unitary operation to her qubit. The four encoded pure states are, up to irrelevant global phases,
They are orthogonal: for any matrix on the first qubit, , and the four Pauli operators are orthogonal in the trace inner product. Explicitly,
Alice sends her qubit through the quantum channel once. Bob now holds both qubits and performs a Bell-basis measurement. Its four orthogonal projectors identify with certainty, giving
Before the transmission, Bob's reduced density matrix is for every message, so shared entanglement alone does not convey the message.
Without shared entanglement, a noiseless single-qubit transmission cannot perfectly distinguish four messages: perfect discrimination requires orthogonal state supports, and its two-dimensional Hilbert space has room for at most two nonzero mutually orthogonal supports. The Holevo bound also limits its accessible classical information to one bit. For the usual protocol starting with a shared two-qubit pure state and using local unitary encodings, exact two-bit transmission requires a maximally mixed Bob marginal. Indeed all encoded joint states are pure and have the same , while Subadditivity of Von Neumann entropy gives their average entropy at most . Four equally likely perfectly distinguishable messages have average Von Neumann entropy two, forcing and hence a maximally entangled state.
The specification “quantum channel” alone does not determine its dimension or noise, so the one-qubit, noiseless interpretation is needed for this particular conclusion. A noiseless four-dimensional channel could send four orthogonal states without any shared entanglement; a completely depolarizing qubit channel cannot transmit the message even with a shared Bell pair, since its output is independent of Alice's encoding. Shared entanglement is therefore the extra resource for the intended single-qubit channel, not a guarantee for every unspecified quantum channel.
Let be Alice's unknown qubit, with pure state . Alice and Bob initially share the Bell state . Alice holds and Bob holds . Define the Bell basis
Expanding in this orthonormal basis gives the Bell-basis teleportation identity
For example, the last branch on is , which is ; the ordering of the Pauli operators therefore matters.
Alice performs a projective measurement in the Bell basis on her two local qubits. Each outcome has probability , independent of the unknown amplitudes. She encodes the four possible outcomes as two classical bits and sends them to Bob. For outcomes , respectively, Bob applies the local unitary operations
These are inverses of the corresponding branch Pauli operators, so Bob obtains exactly the unknown input qubit in every branch. Using instead of as the last correction also succeeds up to an irrelevant overall phase. Alice need not know or . Every quantum operation is local to one of the parties, and the only transmitted information is the two-bit classical outcome. The shared Bell pair is consumed.
Before the message arrives, Bob's density operator is
so no unknown-state information is available without the classical communication. Alice's original qubit has been included in the destructive Bell-basis measurement; the protocol creates no extra copy. Since the corrected transformation is the identity on every input vector and is linear, it also preserves entanglement with an external reference and transfers mixed inputs. Thus this is deterministic quantum teleportation, using precisely one shared maximally entangled Bell pair, two classical bits, and local operations.
Yes: use superdense coding, with a shared Bell state. Let the sender and receiver initially hold the first and second qubits of . To encode bits , the sender applies to her qubit. These Pauli operators produce four orthogonal states:
She sends this qubit through the noiseless quantum channel. The receiver then possesses both qubits. He applies a controlled-NOT gate from the received qubit to his original qubit, followed by a Hadamard gate on the received qubit. This maps the four states in the table to . A measurement in the computational basis therefore recovers the two bits with certainty. No classical message is sent.
The resource assumption deserves care: one-qubit superdense coding needs a Bell pair already shared before encoding. If none is initially available, the sender can prepare a Bell pair locally and send one half through the same noiseless quantum channel in advance. The protocol then uses two transmitted qubits in total, including distribution of the entanglement, still with no classical communication. Alternatively, sending two computational basis qubits directly also communicates two bits. With a pre-shared Bell pair, one transmitted qubit suffices; without it, the entanglement-distribution cost must be counted. An unassisted single transmitted qubit cannot perfectly encode four classical messages: its Holevo bound is at most bit.
Let and choose an orthonormal basis of . The reduced density matrix on is the partial trace
Here is the identity on , and the bras and kets in the sum contract only the second tensor factor. Equivalently, if , then . The definition is independent of the chosen basis: it is characterized by for every operator on .
The generalized measurement postulate takes to be operators on satisfying . The Born rule and the conditional state update give
If the outcome is not supplied to , the appropriate post-measurement density matrix is . For any local operator , cyclicity of the full trace gives
Since this holds for every , . This is the no-communication theorem.
The invariance concerns the nonselective measurement in quantum mechanics. A conditional reduced density matrix can change, although . For example, measuring one half of a Bell pair in the computational basis changes the other half conditionally to or ; before learning the outcome, its density matrix remains . Thus distant measurement in quantum measurements cannot transmit a controllable signal without classical communication. This quantum no-signalling is compatible with special relativity, even though some entangled states have correlations incompatible with a local hidden-variable theory.
Write , , so and . Regrouping the four copies by party gives
where counts zeroes. Alice must measure only this count, preserving coherence inside each degenerate eigenspace, rather than measuring her four bits separately. Her projective measurement has projectors , and the Born rule gives
Alice sends to Bob. Up to the common phase of , their conditional pure state is
This is Schmidt projection entanglement concentration: its equal Schmidt coefficients give a maximally entangled state of Schmidt rank .
For or , , and the branch is a product state. No Bell pair can be extracted using local operations and classical communication. The respective probabilities are and .
For or , . List the four surviving strings in lexicographic order as . For this list is ; for it is . Each party applies a local unitary operation extending the basis relabelling
Such a unitary exists because these are four distinct orthonormal basis vectors mapped to four distinct basis vectors; extend the mapping to a permutation of all sixteen. Discarding the two fixed local ancillary bits leaves
Thus these branches give exactly two Bell pairs, with probabilities and , and no further measurement in quantum mechanics is needed.
For , the six strings in lexicographic order are , , , , , . A suitable local POVM gives two Bell pairs with certainty, rather than losing some of these branches to a simple subspace projection. Partition these labels into the three pairs , , . Alice uses the Kraus operators
On the six-dimensional support, each label is retained by two operators, so . Add to define a complete measurement in quantum mechanics on Alice's four qubits; that extra outcome has probability zero on this branch. Each nonzero outcome has conditional probability , and gives the normalized state
Alice sends to Bob. Both parties relabel the four surviving strings in increasing order to on two output qubits, with two fixed ancillary bits, just as above. Every therefore gives two Bell pairs. The joint probability of is for each .
For an explicit local implementation of this POVM, Alice can append an ancilla in a fixed state and apply an isometry on the six-dimensional support,
It preserves inner products, extends to a unitary on system and ancilla, and measuring the ancilla realizes precisely the operators . No nonlocal operation has been used. This is a deterministic reduction of maximally entangled Schmidt rank from six to four.
The complete output distribution for this strategy is consequently
The mean yield is pairs per four-copy block. These are the maximum possible pair counts after the stipulated count measurement: any nonzero branch has Schmidt rank at most six, whereas three independent Bell pairs require Schmidt rank eight. In any refined LOCC branch the coefficient matrix is multiplied by local matrices on the left and right, which cannot increase its rank.
The normalized ray produces a secure key; the literal printed vector is not normalized. The squared norm of the coefficients in the PDF is . Thus the physical pure state on that ray has normalized coefficients and . This is a genuine entangled state with two nonzero Schmidt coefficients, and Eve is independent of it by purity decouples a subsystem from its purification.
For an explicit way to obtain uniform key bits, Alice applies a two-outcome local measurement in quantum mechanics with Kraus operators
Their squared products sum to the identity. The successful unnormalized state is , so
Alice announces only success or failure. Success leaves an exact Bell pair, yielding one uniform secret bit; failure leaves and is discarded. With many copies the successful fraction is positive. Alternatively, direct computational basis measurements give a shared biased bit with probabilities and , from which privacy amplification can extract uniform secret bits. The coefficient has not been silently replaced by .
A secure key can be produced, at one ideal secret bit per copy. Denote Alice's additional flag qubit by . Alice can measure in the computational basis and, when its outcome is , apply the Pauli Z gate to her half of the shared pair. The two flag outcomes each have probability , and ; either branch therefore supplies the same pure Bell pair.
Equivalently, Alice applies the local controlled unitary
This local flag correction of a Bell-state phase mixture changes the full density matrix into
The corrected pair is pure, so every purification factors between and . Eve may know the flag without knowing the key bit obtained from . Alice need not disclose the flag, but even disclosing it does not compromise the corrected pure Bell pair. Tracing out the flag before correction would give the nonprivate mixture in the preceding case; retaining Alice's local side information is essential.
Insecure as a proposed test-and-purify protocol: the basis string and check positions are announced before receipt. Eve can intercept and store the travelling qubits until the announcement. For each data position with basis bit , she measures the stored qubit in the basis . If the outcome is , the Alice–Bob pair becomes
and Eve knows . She forwards that qubit, and forwards every publicly identified check qubit untouched. After Bob's Hadamard gate decoding, every data pair is the known product state , while the unmodified check pairs remain perfect. Thus the check bit error rate is zero even though Eve knows all raw data bits. This is premature basis announcement in quantum key distribution.
The retained data are a separable quantum state with a classical label held by Eve; LOCC cannot turn them into private Bell pairs. Consequently the listed check does not justify the claimed success of the subsequent entanglement purification. A sound purification procedure that independently detects the missing entanglement must fail or abort on this attack. If Step 9 were instead read as an independently guaranteed production of private, nearly perfect Bell pairs, their subsequent key would of course be private; the flaw is that this protocol's test cannot establish that guarantee. Naming an EPP does not repair the information leak or the invalid sampling test.
Impossible to implement as written: Bob is never given the basis string. Step 7 requires him to know which incoming qubits were acted on by a Hadamard gate, but the announcement contains only the check positions. Since , knowing that a transformation is its own inverse does not identify which qubits need it.
Bob cannot recover the missing information from the qubits alone. For each encoded Bell pair, his reduced density matrix is
for either or . His entire received register has the same density matrix for every string , so every local measurement in quantum mechanics has statistics independent of . Nor can one fixed unitary undo both possibilities: preserving requires that unitary to be proportional to , whereas decoding requires it to be proportional to . Supplying the missing basis announcement after receipt would repair the protocol and make it the third one, but that communication is absent from the printed sequence.
Secure in the intended ideal setting, with a sound entanglement-purification procedure. Bob confirms receipt before Alice reveals either the random basis string or the randomly chosen check positions. Eve must therefore release the travelling qubits before knowing which basis to use and which positions to protect from disturbance. Bob can then decode because .
The random check sample tests the same ensemble of encoded transmissions as the retained data. Random computational basis and Hadamard basis encodings make the test sensitive to complementary disturbances; Eve cannot use the targeted zero-error attack available in Protocol 1. For example, measuring every intercepted qubit in one fixed one of these two bases uses the wrong basis half the time, and then disagrees with Alice half the time, producing a bit error rate of . A sound entanglement purification protocol uses the tested error bounds, corrects both relevant types of error, and aborts if the noise is too high; secrecy is not claimed for every possible attack without an abort option.
When the protocol succeeds in producing nearly perfect Bell pairs, purity decouples a subsystem from its purification explains why they are nearly independent of Eve, and matching computational basis measurements produce an approximately uniform shared secret key. The disclosed check outcomes are discarded rather than included in that key. This is the standard entanglement-based quantum key distribution ordering: receipt first, basis and sample disclosure second, testing and purification next, and private measurements last.
The relevant security model gives Eve the purifying system and access to the public transcript. A useful preliminary fact is that purity decouples a subsystem from its purification. If the Alice–Bob marginal is and is a purification of a density operator, then for every ,
Hence : Eve is uncorrelated with their joint pure state. A Bell pair then supplies a uniform shared secret bit when both parties measure in the computational basis. Pure product states have no shared random correlations, while a mixed state must be assessed with its purifying information included. The classifications below use the usual quantum key distribution setting with an authenticated public classical channel; no full security proof is required.
They need a pre-shared entanglement resource that permits deterministic production of a Bell pair. In particular, one shared Bell pair and two classical bits suffice for exact quantum teleportation. This condition is stronger than merely having some entanglement.
Let Alice's input be , and let her system and Bob's system share . Use the Bell states and . Direct expansion gives
Alice performs a projective measurement in this Bell basis and sends its two-bit outcome. Each outcome has probability . Bob applies respectively , recovering exactly, without either party knowing . Before he receives the outcome, his averaged state is , so the protocol does not communicate without the classical message. Alice's measurement consumes the input and the shared entanglement.
For necessity, exact transmission of every pure qubit means the induced quantum channel is the identity: pure-state projectors span the operator space, and a physical channel is linear. Alice can therefore prepare a Bell pair locally and transmit one half by the proposed protocol, leaving a Bell pair shared with Bob. The protocol would itself be a deterministic local operations and classical communication conversion of their resource into a Bell pair. This proves the exact teleportation resource criterion. With no shared entanglement, it is impossible: local operations and classical communication preserve separable quantum states, whereas the resulting Bell pair would be entangled.
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.
Use the usual asymptotic convention: the output approaches the desired -copy pure target in trace distance, and any recorded failure probability tends to zero. Define the binary entropy
The entanglement entropies per source and target are and . The asymptotic pure-state entanglement conversion rate is
Both achievability and the upper bound matter here.
For entanglement concentration, expand sources in their correlated computational basis. Every pair of strings of Hamming weight has the same amplitude . Alice measures only this weight, without resolving the individual string. Bob's string has the same weight automatically. Conditional on , the normalized state is maximally entangled on correlated strings. Its outcome probability is , a binomial distribution. By the weak law of large numbers, in probability; Stirling's formula then gives . A uniform Schmidt vector on entries is majorized by a uniform vector on entries padded with zeros. Thus Nielsen's pure-state conversion theorem converts the conditional state into that many Bell pairs exactly. For any fixed , one obtains at least Bell pairs with probability tending to one.
For entanglement dilution, consider the Schmidt strings of targets with probabilities . The quantum typical subspace retains strings satisfying
The retained probability tends to one by the weak law applied to the independent variables . The number of retained strings is at most , because their probabilities sum to at most one. Normalize the target after truncation to those strings. Its squared overlap with the full target is . A uniform Schmidt vector of dimension , with , is majorized by the truncated target's Schmidt vector padded with zeros: the sum of its largest entries is at least . Hence Bell pairs prepare the truncated target exactly by LOCC. Its trace distance from the true target is . Combining concentration and dilution achieves any rate . Choosing margins tending sufficiently slowly to zero attains the ratio as a limiting rate.
For the converse, average monotonicity of pure-state entanglement entropy follows from Concavity of Von Neumann entropy: a measurement by one party leaves the other party's reduction unchanged on average, so its average conditional entropy cannot increase. Refine local measurement records, including local discarded systems, to obtain pure output branches on the output qubits of each party. Iterating the concavity argument gives
Let and let the squared-overlap error of the average output be . Define , the pure-state trace distance. Concavity of the square root gives . Partial trace cannot increase trace distance, so the reduced states are also within . The continuity bound for quantum conditional entropy, with trivial conditioning and local dimension , implies
Consequently
which excludes a limiting rate exceeding .
The vanishing-error convention is essential. If exact deterministic conversion were required for every finite block, majorization would also require the largest squared Schmidt coefficient to satisfy , hence
This can be strictly smaller than the entropy ratio: at , the two bounds are approximately and . Thus the boxed rate answers the standard asymptotic task, rather than imposing unmentioned exact zero-error conditions on every finite block.
In quantum teleportation, Alice transfers an arbitrary unknown qubit using one shared Bell pair and two bits of classical communication. Define , with . Regrouping the initial three-qubit state into this Bell basis gives
Alice's Bell-basis measurement selects each label with probability . She sends to Bob, who applies the inverse , restoring . The correction depends on the measurement label, not on the unknown amplitudes. Before the message, Bob's average state is , independent of the input; quantum no-signalling therefore prevents superluminal communication. The shared pair is consumed and Alice does not retain an independent copy, in agreement with the no-cloning theorem.
The Bouwmeester quantum teleportation experiment used photon polarization, a down-conversion entangled pair, a beam-splitter Bell-state analyzer and coincidence-conditioned output polarization measurements. Temporal indistinguishability of the two analyzer photons was essential. Its successful selected Bell outcome demonstrated the state transfer, rather than a deterministic implementation of all four outcomes.[ref]
The general experimental tasks are to distribute entanglement, prepare and synchronize the input, perform a sufficiently discriminating joint measurement, communicate the label and apply or account for the correction. A demonstration must test nonorthogonal input states, not merely transfer a known classical basis label. Finite efficiency, accidental coincidences, distinguishability and phase drift reduce success probability or teleportation fidelity. Postselected verification, a heralded usable output and unconditional deterministic teleportation are distinct experimental claims.
Quantum teleportation transfers an unknown qubit state using a previously shared Bell pair, local operations and two classical bits. It requires no description of the unknown complex amplitudes and produces no extra copy.
Let the input be , and let Alice and Bob share . Alice applies a controlled-NOT gate from to , then a Hadamard gate to . Expanding the circuit gives the Bell-basis teleportation identity in computational-output form:
Her projective measurement yields each bit pair with probability . She sends the two classical bits, and Bob applies to recover . The order is the inverse of the displayed conditional operator; interchanging these Pauli corrections changes only an irrelevant global phase when both bits are one.
Before receiving the bits, Bob has
Thus teleportation respects the no-communication theorem and cannot transmit the usable unknown state faster than the classical message. Alice's input has been measured, and the shared entanglement resource has been consumed, in agreement with the no-cloning theorem. The protocol transfers the state, not the material particle initially carrying it.
A physical implementation must distribute and preserve an entangled pair, implement a Bell-basis measurement and transmit its result to a controllable output system. Imperfect entanglement, lost outcomes and noisy corrections reduce quantum fidelity; a heralded probabilistic experiment must report its success probability separately from conditional fidelity. Ideal deterministic teleportation assumes every Bell outcome can be identified and corrected.