We are now ready to look at our first protocols for quantum information. In this section, we examine two communication protocols which can be implemented using the tools we have developed in the preceding sections. These protocols are known as superdense coding and quantum teleportation. Both are inherently quantum: there are no classical protocols which behave in the same way. Both involve two parties who wish to perform some communication task between them. In descriptions of such communication protocols (especially in cryptography), it is very common to name the two parties ‘Alice’ and ‘Bob’, for convenience. We will follow this tradition. We will repeatedly refer to communication channels. A quantum communication channel refers to a communication line (e.g. a fiberoptic cable), which can carry qubits between two remote locations. A classical communication channel is one which can carry classical bits (but not qubits).1 The protocols (like many in quantum communication) require that Alice and Bob initially share an entangled pair of qubits in the Bell state The above Bell state is sometimes referred to as an EPR pair. Such a state would have to be created ahead of time, when the qubits are in a lab together and can be made to interact in a way which will give rise to the entanglement between them. After the state is created, Alice and Bob each take one of the two qubits away with them. Alternatively, a third party could create the EPR pair and give one particle to Alice and the other to Bob. If they are careful not to let them interact with the environment, or any other quantum system, Alice and Bob’s joint state will remain entangled. This entanglement becomes a resource which Alice and Bob can use to achieve protocols such as the following. Suppose Alice wishes to send Bob two classical bits of information. Superdense coding is a way of achieving this task over a quantum channel, requiring only that Alice send one qubit to Bob. Alice and Bob must initially share the Bell state Suppose Alice is in possession of the first qubit and Bob the second qubit.
We are now ready to look at our first protocols for quantum information. In this section, we examine two communication protocols which can be implemented using the tools we have developed in the preceding sections. These protocols are known as superdense coding and quantum teleportation. Both are inherently quantum: there are no classical protocols which behave in the same way. Both involve two parties who wish to perform some communication task between them. In descriptions of such communication protocols (especially in cryptography), it is very common to name the two parties ‘Alice’ and ‘Bob’, for convenience. We will follow this tradition. We will repeatedly refer to communication channels. A quantum communication channel refers to a communication line (e.g. a fiberoptic cable), which can carry qubits between two remote locations. A classical communication channel is one which can carry classical bits (but not qubits).1 The protocols (like many in quantum communication) require that Alice and Bob initially share an entangled pair of qubits in the Bell state The above Bell state is sometimes referred to as an EPR pair. Such a state would have to be created ahead of time, when the qubits are in a lab together and can be made to interact in a way which will give rise to the entanglement between them. After the state is created, Alice and Bob each take one of the two qubits away with them. Alternatively, a third party could create the EPR pair and give one particle to Alice and the other to Bob. If they are careful not to let them interact with the environment, or any other quantum system, Alice and Bob’s joint state will remain entangled. This entanglement becomes a resource which Alice and Bob can use to achieve protocols such as the following. Suppose Alice wishes to send Bob two classical bits of information. Superdense coding is a way of achieving this task over a quantum channel, requiring only that Alice send one qubit to Bob. Alice and Bob must initially share the Bell state Suppose Alice is in possession of the first qubit and Bob the second qubit.
This chapter begins our first exciting application of the postulates of the quantum theory to quantum communication. We study the fundamental, unit quantum communication protocols. These protocols involve a single sender Alice and a single receiver Bob. The protocols are ideal and noiseless because we assume that Alice and Bob can exploit perfect classical communication, perfect quantum communication, and perfect entanglement. At the end of this chapter, we suggest how to incorporate imperfections into these protocols for later study. Alice and Bob may wish to perform one of several quantum informationprocessing tasks, such as the transmission of classical information, quantum information, or entanglement. Several fundamental protocols make use of these resources: 1. We will see that noiseless entanglement is an important resource in quantum Shannon theory because it enables Alice and Bob to perform other protocols that are not possible with classical resources only. We will present a simple, idealized protocol for generating entanglement, named entanglement distribution . 2. Alice may wish to communicate classical information to Bob. A trivial method, named elementary coding , is a simple way of doing so and we discuss it briefly. 3. A more interesting technique for transmitting classical information is superdense coding . It exploits a noiseless qubit channel and shared entanglement to transmit more classical information than would be possible with a noiseless qubit channel alone. 4. Finally, Alice may wish to transmit quantum information to Bob. A trivial method for her to do so is to exploit a noiseless qubit channel. However, it is useful to have other ways for transmitting quantum information because such a resource is difficult to engineer in practice. An alternative, surprising method for transmitting quantum information is quantum teleportation . The teleportation protocol exploits classical communication and shared entanglement to transmit quantum information. Each of these protocols is a fundamental unit protocol and provides a foundation for asking further questions in quantum Shannon theory. In fact, the discovery of these latter two protocols was the stimulus for much of the original research in quantum Shannon theory. One could take each of these protocols and ask about its performance if one or more of the resources involved is noisy rather than noiseless. Later chapters of this book explore many of these possibilities.
The beauty of the quantum circuit lies in the fact that it can perform certain tasks which are impossible in the classical world. For example, consider teleportation and superdense coding. Teleportation is a quantum task in which an unknown quantum state is transmitted from a sender (Alice) to a spatially separated receiver (Bob) via an entangled quantum channel and with the help of some classical communications. Dense coding is another communication scheme in which if Alice and Bob share a prior entanglement then one of them can send n bits of classical information to the other by communicating m-qubits (m < n). Before we go into the technical details of these two schemes let us try to lucidly visualize the uniqueness of teleportation. Suppose Alice and Bob are spatially separated and Alice wants to send an unknown quantum state |ψ〉 = α|0〉 + β|1〉 to Bob. For some reason she is not allowed to send the state directly through a quantum channel. She cannot measure it and send the information to Bob because the moment she will try to measure the state, it will collapse either to |0〉 or to |1〉. But the state can be sent by using a simple quantum circuit (pre-shared entanglement) and some classical communications. In the process the unknown quantum state gets destroyed at Alice’s end and reappears at Bob’s end. The state never exists in the communication channel. This process is called quantum teleportation. The uniqueness of quantum teleportation will be clearer if we note that the Fax is not an example of teleportation because the original copy remains with the sender. Again a letter posted in a letter box is not an example of teleportation because the letter exists (travels) in its original form in the communication channel. In brief, there is no classical analogue of quantum teleportation. The same is true for dense coding. In this chapter we will describe these two unique quantum communication schemes and discuss their significance and applications.
This chapter begins our first exciting application of the postulates of the quantum theory to quantum communication. We study the fundamental, unit quantum communication protocols. These protocols involve a single sender, whom we name Alice, and a single receiver, whom we name Bob. The protocols are ideal and noiseless because we assume that Alice and Bob can exploit perfect classical communication, perfect quantum communication, and perfect entanglement. At the end of this chapter, we suggest how to incorporate imperfections into these protocols for later study. Alice and Bob may wish to perform one of several quantum information-processing tasks, such as the transmission of classical information, quantum information, or entanglement. Several fundamental protocols make use of these resources: 1. We will see that noiseless entanglement is an important resource in quantum Shannon theory because it enables Alice and Bob to perform other protocols that are not possible with classical resources only. We will present a simple, idealized protocol for generating entanglement, named entanglement distribution . 2. Alice may wish to communicate classical information to Bob. A trivial method, named elementary coding , is a simple way for doing so and we discuss it briefly. 3. A more interesting technique for transmitting classical information is superdense coding . It exploits a noiseless qubit channel and shared entanglement to transmit more classical information than would be possible with a noiseless qubit channel alone. […]
Abstract This chapter discusses some of the ways in which quantum entanglement can be used for quantum communication. Suppose Alice and Bob share an entangled state: they can use it for dense coding, in which Alice sends Bob just one qubit of an entangled pair, which delivers two bits of classical information. Alice and Bob can also use an entangled state for teleportation, in which a qubit in a unknown quantum state is teleported from Alice to Bob when Alice sends Bob two classical bits. Entanglement swapping is an example of a tripartite communication protocol. If Alice and Bob share entanglement, and Bob and Charlie share entanglement, entanglement swapping can be used to entangle Alice and Charlie. Even if Alice and Bob are entangled, Alice cannot communicate with Bob without sending him classical bits or qubits, which prevents Alice and Bob from breaking the laws of relativity. This chapter also discusses Pauli matrices and the extension of Hilbert spaces.
We show that with the fourpartite quantum channel used to teleport an arbitrary two qubit state, we can construct a superdense coding protocol where it is possible to transmit 4 bits of classical information sending only 2 qubits. Alice and Bob initially share a four qubit maximally entangled state and by locally manipulating her two qubits Alice can generate 16 orthogonal maximally entangled states, which are used to encode the message transmitted to Bob. He reads the 4 bit message by a generalized Bell state measurement. A generalized protocol in which 2N bits of classical information is transmitted via N qubits is also presented. We also show that this four(2N-)partite channel is equivalent to two(N) Bell states, which proves that we need two(N) Bell states to teleport a two(N) qubit system.
Abstract This laboratory work presents a practical implementation of quantum teleportation and superdense coding using the Qiskit framework. The material is based on educational resources developed by the International Quantum Center at CERN (Switzerland) and is designed to provide hands-on experience with multi-qubit quantum protocols and hybrid quantum-classical workflows. In Laboratory Work No. 5, participants implement the quantum teleportation protocol step by step. The procedure begins with the preparation of a randomly generated qubit by directly assigning complex probability amplitudes. The state vector is normalized to ensure physical validity, defining the amplitudes corresponding to the computational basis states ∣0⟩|0\rangle∣0⟩ and ∣1⟩|1\rangle∣1⟩. Once the qubit is prepared for teleportation, an entangled Bell pair is generated to establish a shared quantum channel between two parties, conventionally referred to as Alice and Bob. The protocol proceeds with joint operations and measurement of two classical bits on Alice’s side. The measurement outcomes determine conditional unitary corrections applied to Bob’s qubit, enabling the reconstruction of the original quantum state without physically transmitting the qubit itself. The laboratory exercise includes the construction of a circuit with separate quantum registers and classical bits, explicit amplitude assignment for Alice’s qubit, and verification of successful state transfer through measurement statistics. In addition to teleportation, the conceptual framework of superdense coding is discussed as a complementary protocol demonstrating how entanglement enhances classical information capacity. Together, these experiments illustrate the operational role of entanglement as a quantum communication resource. The guide emphasizes practical circuit design, normalization of quantum states, entanglement generation, conditional gate operations, and execution on both simulators and real quantum hardware. Through this laboratory work, participants gain experimental insight into two cornerstone protocols of quantum information science.