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arXiv:1304.8053 · Physical Review A

Optical communication without photons

Nicolas Gisin

Published Sep 25, 2013• 24 citations
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Abstract

We show how communication without a physical system carrying the information from the sender to the receiver can be realized. The main point is that sending the vacuum state is not nothing. This extends the recent work by Salih et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 170502 (2013)].
DOI
10.1103/physreva.88.030301

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The natural choice of physical qubit for quantum communication is the photon: a photon can be transmitted quickly from the sender to a distant receiver and the technology for creating, manipulating, distributing, and measuring light pulses is well established. Many of these classical techniques can also be employed for quantum communication protocols. We will therefore focus our attention on optical setups for quantum communication. We will study a number of optical setups in the next few sections and use the conventions introduced in Chapter 4 to analyze them. In particular, we will assume that the qubits are encoded in the degrees of freedom of a single photon. Some of the main technical challenges in quantum communication arise from this need to work with single photon pulses. For instance, photons do not interact with each other in vacuum or linear media, and interactions between two photons in non-linear optical media are relatively small, so that realizing entangling two photon gates via coherent interactions is a challenging task. The quantum communication schemes discussed here circumvent this technical problem to a large extent. They only use non-linear optical materials for parametric down-conversion to create Bell-pairs of photons and then exploit standard linear optical devices and photo-detectors to manipulate them. No further non-linear entangling gates are required. Parametric down-conversion In non-linear optical media a single photon can be down-converted into a pair of photons. In this coherent process the incoming photon is destroyed and two photons of lower energy are created.
In a recent paper [Phys. Rev. A 94, 032115 (2016)], Griffiths questioned---based on an interesting consistent-histories (CH) argument---the counterfactuality, for one of the bit choices, of the protocol of Salih et al. for communicating without sending physical particles [Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 170502 (2013)]. Here, we first show that for the Mach-Zehnder version used to explain our protocol, contrary to Griffiths's claim, no family of consistent histories exists where any history has the photon traveling through the communication channel, thus rendering the question of whether the photon was in the communication channel meaningless from a CH viewpoint. We then show that for the actual Michelson-type protocol, there is a consistent-histories family for each cycle that includes histories where the photon travels through the communication channel. We show that the probability of finding the photon in the communication channel at any time is zero---proving complete counterfactuality.
We suggest a method to perform a quantum logic gate between distant quantum bits (qubits) by off-resonant field-atom dispersive interactions. The scheme we present is shown to work ideally even in the presence of errors in the photon channels used for communication. The stability against errors arises from the paradoxical situation that the transmitted photons carry no information about the state of the qubits. In contrast to a previous proposal for ideal communication [Phys. Rev. Lett. 78, 4293 (1997)] our proposal only involves single atoms in the sending and receiving devices.