No abstract

Quantum communication holds promise for absolutely secure transmission of secret messages and the faithful transfer of unknown quantum states. Photonic channels appear to be very attractive for the physical implementation of quantum communication. However, owing to losses and decoherence in the channel, the communication fidelity decreases exponentially with the channel length. Here we describe a scheme that allows the implementation of robust quantum communication over long lossy channels. The scheme involves laser manipulation of atomic ensembles, beam splitters, and single-photon detectors with moderate efficiencies, and is therefore compatible with current experimental technology. We show that the communication efficiency scales polynomially with the channel length, and hence the scheme should be operable over very long distances.

Invertible local transformations of a multipartite system are used to define equivalence classes in the set of entangled states. This classification concerns the entanglement properties of a single copy of the state. Accordingly, we say that two states have the same kind of entanglement if both of them can be obtained from the other by means of local operations and classical communication (LOCC) with nonzero probability. When applied to pure states of a three-qubit system, this approach reveals the existence of two inequivalent kinds of genuine tripartite entanglement, for which the GHZ state and a W state appear as remarkable representatives. In particular, we show that the W state retains maximally bipartite entanglement when any one of the three qubits is traced out. We generalize our results both to the case of higher dimensional subsystems and also to more than three subsystems, for all of which we show that, typically, two randomly chosen pure states cannot be converted into each other by means of LOCC, not even with a small probability of success. 03.65.Bz, 03.65.Ca, 03.67.Hk

We present an exact model of the detection statistics of a probabilistic source of photon pairs from which a fast, simple and precise method to measure the source's brightness and photon channel transmissions is demonstrated. We measure such properties for a source based on spontaneous parametric downconversion in a periodically poled LiNbO 3 crystal producing pairs at 810 and 1550 nm wavelengths. We further validate the model by comparing the predicted and measured values for the g (2) (0) of a heralded single photon source over a wide range of the brightness. Our model is of particular use for monitoring and tuning the brightness on demand as required for various quantum communication applications. We comment on its applicability to sources involving spectral and/or spatial filtering.