ABSTRACT

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.