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How Quantum is Quantum Counterfactual Communication?

Jonte R. Hance, J Ladyman, JG Rarity

Published Feb 4, 2021• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Quantum Counterfactual Communication is the recently-proposed idea of using quantum physics to send messages between two parties, without any matter/energy transfer associated with the bits sent. While this has excited massive interest, both for potential ‘unhackable’ communication, and insight into the foundations of quantum mechanics, it has been asked whether this process is essentially quantum, or could be performed classically. We examine counterfactual communication, both classical and quantum, and show that the protocols proposed so far for sending signals that don’t involve matter/energy transfer associated with the bits sent must be quantum, insofar as they require wave-particle duality.

DOI
10.25405/ncl.34496415

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Quantum Counterfactual Communication is the recently-proposed idea of using quantum physics to send messages between two parties, without any matter/energy transfer associated with the bits sent. While this has excited massive interest, both for potential ‘unhackable’ communication, and insight into the foundations of quantum mechanics, it has been asked whether this process is essentially quantum, or could be performed classically. We examine counterfactual communication, both classical and quantum, and show that the protocols proposed so far for sending signals that don’t involve matter/energy transfer associated with the bits sent must be quantum, insofar as they require wave-particle duality.
Abstract Quantum Counterfactual Communication is the recently-proposed idea of using quantum physics to send messages between two parties, without any matter/energy transfer associated with the bits sent. While this has excited massive interest, both for potential ‘unhackable’ communication, and insight into the foundations of quantum mechanics, it has been asked whether this process is essentially quantum, or could be performed classically. We examine counterfactual communication, both classical and quantum, and show that the protocols proposed so far for sending signals that don’t involve matter/energy transfer associated with the bits sent must be quantum, insofar as they require wave-particle duality.
Abstract Counterfactual quantum communication is one of the most interesting facets of quantum communication, allowing two parties to communicate without any transmission of quantum or classical particles between the parties involved in the communication process. This aspect of quantum communication originates from the interaction-free measurements where the chained quantum Zeno effect plays an important role. Here, we propose a new counterfactual quantum communication protocol for transmitting an entangled state from a pair of electrons to two independent photons. Interestingly, the protocol proposed here shows that the counterfactual method can be employed to transfer information from house qubits to flying qubits. Following this, we show that the protocol finds uses in building quantum repeaters leading to a counterfactual quantum network, enabling counterfactual communication over a linear quantum network.
Counterfactual quantum communication---sending information between two remote parties without transmitting any physical particle over the channel---is unique in quantum protocols. By harnessing the nonlocality of counterfactual quantum protocols, we devise a distributed controlled NOT (DNOT) operation to transfer information in both directions at the same time. This new form of full-duplex communication, called quantum duplex coding, enables communicating parties to exchange either classical or quantum messages simultaneously and counterfactually by means of nonlocal controlled entanglement and/or disentanglement of the DNOT operation. We demonstrate the quantum duplex coding for both classical and quantum information using the (chained) quantum Zeno effect and show that these quantum duplex communication protocols form full-duplex binary and quantum erasure channels, respectively.
The classical theories of communication rely on the assumption that there has to be a flow of particles from Bob to Alice in order for him to send a message to her. We develop a quantum protocol that allows Alice to perceive Bob's message ``counterfactually''; that is, without Alice receiving any particles that have interacted with Bob. By utilizing a setup built on results from interaction-free measurements, we outline a communication protocol whereby the information travels in the opposite direction of the emitted particles. In comparison to previous attempts on such protocols, this one is such that a weak measurement at the message source would not leave a weak trace that could be detected by Alice's receiver. While some interaction-free schemes require a large number of carefully aligned beam splitters, our protocol is realizable with two or more beam splitters. We demonstrate this protocol by numerically solving the time-dependent Schr\"odinger equation for a Hamiltonian that implements this quantum counterfactual phenomenon.
This paper proposes two new full-duplex quantum communication protocols to exchange classical or quantum information between two remote parties simultaneously without transferring a physical particle over the quantum channel. The first protocol, called quantum duplex coding, enables to exchange of a classical bit using a preshared maximally entangled pair of qubits by means of counterfactual disentanglement. The second protocol, called quantum telexchanging, enables to exchange an arbitrary unknown qubit without using preshared entanglement by means of counterfactual entanglement and disentanglement. We demonstrate the quantum duplex coding and quantum telexchanging by exploiting counterfactual electron-photon interaction gates and show that these quantum duplex communication protocols form full-duplex binary erasure channel and quantum erasure channels, respectively.