The effect of the dissipation and finite number of beam splitters are discussed. A method using balanced dissipation to improve the communication for finite beam splitters, which greatly increases communication reliability with an expense of decreasing communication efficiency.
Abstract Recently, the direct counterfactual communication protocol, proposed by Salih et al (2013 Phys. Rev. Lett. 110 170502 ) using a single photon source under ideal conditions (no dissipation, no phase fluctuation and an infinite number of beam splitters), has attracted much interest from a broad range of scientists. In order to put the direct communication protocol into a realistic framework, we numerically simulate the effect of the dissipation and the phase fluctuation with a finite number of beam splitters. Our calculation shows that the dissipation and phase fluctuation will dramatically decrease the reliability and the efficiency of communication, and even corrupt the communication. To counteract the negative effect of dissipation, we propose the balanced dissipation method, which substantially improves the reliability of the protocol at the expense of decreasing communication efficiency. Meanwhile, our theoretical derivation shows that the reliability and efficiency of communication are independent of the input state: a single photon state or a coherent state.
A scheme for suppressing the correlated noise in signals transmitted over the bosonic Gaussian memory channels is proposed. This is a compromise solution rather than removing the noise completely. The scheme is based on linear optical elements, two N-port splitters and N number of phase flips. The proposed scheme has the advantages that the correlated noise of the memory channels is greatly suppressed, and the input signal states can be protected excellently when transmitting over the noise channels. We examine the suppressing efficiency of the scheme for the correlated noise, both from quantum information of the states directly transmitted through the noise channel and also from the entanglement teleportation. The operation of phase flips in our scheme is important for the suppression of the correlated noise, which can diminish the effect of noise in quantum communication. Increasing the number of beam splitters also can improve the suppressing efficiency of the scheme in quantum communication.
Since the protocol for counterfactual quantum communication was proposed, complete counterfactuality can be achieved as there are no physical particles in the transmission channel. However, it relies on some restrictive factors, such as requiring an infinite number of beam splitters and no degradation. We conducted numerical simulations to assess the reliability of quantum communication combined with the actual test environment and found that the inevitable degradation, including component losses or path losses, limits the number of beam splitters. Furthermore, we carried out the experimental simulation of a high-reliability direct communication protocol using the method of controllable-signal attenuation. The peak reliability of μ1=27.6±0.22 that was obtained was much higher than the current communication protocol of the chained interferometer system. The optimized experimental equipment could compensate the system’s balance under various restrictive conditions and make it possible to achieve 100% reliability with imperfect interferometers.