How many bits of information can a single photon carry? Intuition says "one", but this is incorrect. With an alphabet based on the photon's time of arrival, energy, and polarization, several bits can be encoded. In this introduction to photon information efficiency, we explain how to calculate the maximum number of bits per photon depending on the number of encoding modes, noise, and losses.

arXiv:1712.05682Dec 14, 20175 citations

Nature Photonics

How many bits can a photon carry?

David F. P. Pile

Published Dec 22, 2011• 11 citations

Publisher

DOI: 10.1038/nphoton.2011.330

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n

-bit string. They are tasked to exchange the information of their local n-bit strings with each other, using only a single photon during the communication. It has been shown that the superposition of different spatial locations in a Mach-Zehnder (MZ) interferometer enables bipartite local encodings. We prove that, after the photon's travelling through a cascade of

n

-level MZ interferometers in our protocol, the one of Alice or Bob whose detector clicks can access the other's full information of

n

-bit string, while the other can gain one-bit of information. That is, the wave-particle duality makes two-way signaling possible, and a single photon can carry infinite information as

n

goes infinite.

n

-bit string. They are tasked to exchange the information of their local

n

-bit strings with each other, using only a single photon during the communication. It has been shown that the superposition of different spatial locations in a Mach-Zehnder (MZ) interferometer enables bipartite local encodings. We show that, after the travel of a photon through a cascade of

n

-level MZ interferometers in our protocol, the one of Alice and Bob whose detector clicks can access the other's full information of the

n

-bit string, while the other can gain one bit of information. That is, the wave-particle duality makes two-way signaling possible, and a single photon can carry an arbitrarily large (but finite) amount of information.