We revisit the "counterfactual quantum communication" of Salih et al. [1], who claim that an observer "Bob" can send one bit of information to a second observer "Alice" without any physical particle traveling between them. We show that a locally conserved, massless current-specifically, a current of modular angular momentum, L_{z} mod 2ℏ-carries the one bit of information. We integrate the flux of L_{z} mod 2ℏ from Bob to Alice and show that it equals one of the two eigenvalues of L_{z} mod 2ℏ, either 0 or ℏ, thus precisely accounting for the one bit of information he sends her. We previously [2] obtained this result using weak values of L_{z} mod ℏ; here we do not use weak values.
A protocol for transmission of information between two parties introduced by Salih et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 170502 (2013)] involves sending quantum amplitude back and forth through a quantum channel in a series of steps, rather than simply sending a signal in one direction. The authors claimed that their protocol was ``counterfactual'' in the sense that while a quantum channel is needed to connect the parties, its actual usage becomes vanishingly small in the asymptotic limit as the number of steps tends to infinity. Here we show that this claim is incorrect because it uses probabilistic reasoning that is not valid at intermediate times in the presence of quantum interference. When ill-defined probabilities are replaced with a well-defined measure of channel usage, here called ``Cost,'' equal to the absolute square of the amplitude sent through the channel, the total Cost does not go to zero in the asymptotic limit of a large number of steps, but is bounded below by a rigorous inequality. A detailed analysis shows that this bound is satisfied in the protocol of Salih et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 110, 170502 (2013)]. The analysis leading to the bound uses the fact that the Gram matrix formed by inner products of a collection of pure quantum states is additive over Hilbert subspaces and invariant under unitary time transformations. Its off-diagonal elements, which in general are not positive, play a significant role in the formal argument as well as providing a somewhat strange way of visualizing the transfer of information.