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Physica Scripta

Microwave-based continuous variable quantum teleportation in open air

Wanyi Wang, Tianai Zhou, Gang Xu, Xiu‐Bo Chen, Ying Guo

Published Apr 14, 2025• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract Quantum teleportation has achieved significant progress in the optical frequency domain but faces persistent challenges, including high transmission losses and limited transmittance. In contrast, the microwave frequency domain offers distinct advantages, such as reduced absorption losses, lower energy consumption, and compatibility with superconducting quantum technologies. To overcome the limitations of optical quantum teleportation, this study presents a microwave-based continuous-variable quantum teleportation (CVQT) scheme designed for open-air environments at room temperature. The proposed approach employs microwave two-mode squeezed states, with entanglement enhanced through quantum scissors operations to mitigate environmental degradation. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the maximum transmission distance of microwave entangled states for CVQT is about 200 m at room temperature. The results also indicate that the microwave CVQT scheme achieves lower attenuation and higher fidelity over short distances compared to optical frequency CVQT under similar weather conditions. Moreover, microwave quantum states exhibit reduced sensitivity to weather-induced variations, highlighting their robustness and practicality for open-air quantum communication applications.

DOI
10.1088/1402-4896/adcc68

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Abstract Quantum teleportation has achieved significant progress in the optical frequency domain but faces persistent challenges, including high transmission losses and limited transmittance. In contrast, the microwave frequency domain offers distinct advantages, such as reduced absorption losses, lower energy consumption, and compatibility with superconducting quantum technologies. To overcome the limitations of optical quantum teleportation, this study presents a microwave-based continuous-variable quantum teleportation (CVQT) scheme designed for open-air environments at room temperature. The proposed approach employs microwave two-mode squeezed states, with entanglement enhanced through quantum scissors operations to mitigate environmental degradation. Numerical simulations demonstrate that the maximum transmission distance of microwave entangled states for CVQT is about 200 m at room temperature. The results also indicate that the microwave CVQT scheme achieves lower attenuation and higher fidelity over short distances compared to optical frequency CVQT under similar weather conditions. Moreover, microwave quantum states exhibit reduced sensitivity to weather-induced variations, highlighting their robustness and practicality for open-air quantum communication applications.
Microwave technology plays a central role in current wireless communications, including mobile communication and local area networks. The microwave range shows relevant advantages with respect to other frequencies in open-air transmission, such as low absorption losses and low-energy consumption, and in addition, it is the natural working frequency in superconducting quantum technologies. Entanglement distribution between separate parties is at the core of secure quantum communications. Therefore, understanding its limitations in realistic open-air settings, especially in the rather unexplored microwave regime, is crucial for transforming microwave quantum communications into a mainstream technology. Here, we investigate the feasibility of an open-air entanglement distribution scheme with microwave two-mode squeezed states. First, we study the reach of direct entanglement transmission in open air, obtaining a maximum distance of approximately 500 m with parameters feasible for state-of-the-art experiments. Subsequently, we adapt entanglement distillation and entanglement swapping protocols to microwave technology in order to reduce the environment-induced entanglement degradation. The employed entanglement distillation helps to increase quantum correlations in the short-distance low-squeezing regime by up to $46\mathrm{%}$, and the reach of entanglement increases by $14\mathrm{%}$ with entanglement swapping. Importantly, we compute the fidelity of a continuous-variable quantum teleportation protocol using open-air-distributed entanglement as a resource. Finally, we adapt this machinery to explore the limitations of quantum communication between satellites, where the impact of thermal noise is substantially reduced and diffraction losses are dominant.
Continuous-variable quantum key distribution (CV-QKD) enables the efficient distribution of unconditionally secure keys for both communicating parties. Despite significant advancements in optical-based CV-QKD, a persistent challenge is the limited resilience of optical quantum signals to atmospheric noise in free-space channels. This susceptibility leads to considerable degradation in the performance of optical CV-QKD systems, particularly under adverse climatic conditions. Meanwhile, recent advancements in superconducting quantum computing have driven the demand for quantum communication between spatially separated superconducting processors operating at microwave frequencies. To solve the problems, we propose a Gaussian-modulated coherent-state protocol operating at microwave frequencies, utilizing traveling-wave parametric amplifiers to generate entangled states. Our numerical analysis demonstrates that CV-QKD at microwave frequencies enables secure communication in a free-space channel at room temperature. Furthermore, we show that this protocol outperforms the THz frequency protocol over a distance of 20 m and exhibits stronger immunity to interference. Finally, we consider the impact of microwave antenna gain on the protocol's performance, highlighting the decisive role of antenna gain in determining the maximum transmission distance in practical application scenarios.
One of the cornerstones of quantum communication is the unconditionally secure distribution of classical keys between remote parties. This key feature of quantum technology is based on the quantum properties of propagating electromagnetic waves, such as entanglement, or the no-cloning theorem. However, these quantum resources are known to be susceptible to noise and losses, which are omnipresent in open-air communication scenarios. In this paper, we theoretically investigate the perspectives of continuous-variable open-air quantum key distribution at microwave frequencies. In particular, we present a model describing the coupling of propagating microwaves with a noisy environment. Using a protocol based on displaced squeezed states, we demonstrate that continuous-variable quantum key distribution with propagating microwaves can be unconditionally secure with communication at room temperature up to distances of around 200 m, limited by the total coupled noise photon number. Moreover, we show that microwaves can potentially outperform conventional quantum key distribution at telecom wavelengths and imperfect weather conditions.
Continuous variable quantum teleportation (CVQT) plays an important role in practical quantum communication. However, the noise and loss in the actual environment will lead to the degradation of entanglement, which has an effect on the performance of the system in terms of the transmission distance and hence hinders its implementations. In this paper, we suggest an approach to improving the performance of the CVQT system with an embedded noiseless linear amplifier (NLA). By using the NLA, one can amplify the degenerated entangled source to compensate for the attenuation of the fiber. Then we consider the influences of the available gains of the NLA on the performance of the proposed scheme under different lossy channels and entangled sources. The simulation results show that the performance is improved in fidelity and transmission distance, which may provide a feasible and effective method of putting the long-distance CVQT into practical application .
Quantum communication exploits non-classical correlations to achieve efficient and unconditionally secure exchange of information. In particular, the quantum teleportation protocol allows for a deterministic and secure transfer of unknown quantum states by using pre-shared quantum entanglement and classical feedforward communication. Quantum teleportation in the microwave regime provides an important tool for high-fidelity remote quantum operations, enabling distributed quantum computing with superconducting circuits and potentially facilitating short-range, open-air microwave quantum communication. In this context, we consider practical application scenarios for the microwave analog quantum teleportation protocol based on continuous-variable states. We theoretically analyze the effect of feedforward losses and noise on teleportation fidelities of coherent states and show that these imperfections can be fully corrected by an appropriate feedforward gain. Furthermore, we consider quantum teleportation with finite-size codebooks and derive modified no-cloning thresholds as a function of the codebook configuration. Finally, we analyze the security of quantum teleportation under public channel attacks and demonstrate that the corresponding secure fidelity thresholds may drastically differ from the conventional no-cloning values. Our results contribute to the general development of quantum communication protocols and, in particular, illustrate the feasibility of using quantum teleportation in realistic microwave networks for robust and unconditionally secure communication.
The coherent transduction between microwave and optical frequencies is critical to interconnect superconducting quantum processors over long distances. However, it is challenging to establish such a quantum interface with high efficiency and small added noise based on the standard direct conversion scheme. Here, we propose an electro-optic transduction system based on continuous-variable quantum teleportation. Reliable quantum-information transmission can be realized with an arbitrarily small cooperativity, in contrast to the direct conversion scheme, which requires a large minimum cooperativity. We show that the teleportation-based scheme maintains a significant rate advantage robustly for practical thermal noise and all values of cooperativity. We further investigate the performance in the transduction of complex quantum states such as cat states and Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill (GKP) states and show that a higher fidelity can be achieved with the teleportation-based scheme. Our scheme significantly reduces the device requirement, and makes quantum transduction between microwave and optical frequencies feasible in the near future.