We investigate how the efficiency of the quantum teleportation protocol is affected when the qubits involved in the protocol are subjected to noise or decoherence. We study all types of noise usually encountered in real world implementations of quantum communication protocols, namely, the bit flip, phase flip (phase damping), depolarizing, and amplitude damping noise. Several realistic scenarios are studied in which a part or all of the qubits employed in the execution of the quantum teleportation protocol are subjected to the same or different types of noise. We find noise scenarios not yet known in which more noise or less entanglement lead to more efficiency. Furthermore, we show that if noise is unavoidable it is better to subject the qubits to different noise channels in order to obtain an increase in the efficiency of the protocol.

We extend the research program initiated in [Phys. Rev. A 92, 012338 (2015)], where we restricted our attention to noisy deterministic teleportation protocols, to noisy probabilistic (conditional) protocols. Our main goal now is to study how we can increase the fidelity of the teleported state in the presence of noise by working with probabilistic protocols. We work with several scenarios involving the most common types of noise in realistic implementations of quantum communication tasks and find many cases where adding more noise to the probabilistic protocol increases considerably the fidelity of the teleported state, without decreasing the probability of a successful run of the protocol. Also, there are cases where the entanglement of the channel connecting Alice and Bob leading to the greatest fidelity is not maximal. Moreover, there exist cases where the optimal fidelity for the probabilistic protocols are greater than the maximal fidelity (2/3) achievable by using only classical resources, while the optimal ones for the deterministic protocols under the same conditions lie below this limit. This result clearly illustrates that in some cases we can only get a truly quantum teleportation if we use probabilistic instead of deterministic protocols.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, double column, RevTex4; v2: published versio

We study the probabilistic (conditional) teleportation protocol when the entanglement needed to its implementation is given by thermal entanglement, i.e., when the entangled resource connecting Alice and Bob is an entangled mixed state described by the canonical ensemble density matrix. Specifically, the entangled resource we employ here is given by two interacting spin-1/2 systems (two qubits) in equilibrium with a thermal reservoir at temperature T . The interaction between the qubits is described by a Heisenberg-like Hamiltonian, encompassing the Ising, the XX, the XY, the XXX, and XXZ models, with or without external fields. For all those models we show analytically that the probabilistic protocol is exactly equal to the deterministic one whenever we have no external field. However, when we turn on the field the probabilistic protocol outperforms the deterministic one in several interesting ways. Under certain scenarios, for example, the efficiency (average fidelity) of the probabilistic protocol is greater than the deterministic one and increases with increasing temperature, a counterintuitive behavior. We also show regimes in which the probabilistic protocol operates with relatively high success rates and, at the same time, with efficiency greater than the classical limit 2/3, a threshold that cannot be surpassed by any protocol using only classical resources (no entanglement shared between Alice and Bob). The deterministic protocol's efficiency under the same conditions is below 2/3, highlighting that the probabilistic protocol is the only one yielding a genuine quantum teleportation. We also show that near the quantum critical points for almost all those models the qualitative and quantitative behaviors of the efficiency change considerably, even at finite T .

We push the limits of the direct use of partially pure entangled states to perform quantum teleportation by presenting several protocols in many different scenarios that achieve the optimal efficiency possible. We review and put in a single formalism the three major strategies known to date that allow one to use partially entangled states for direct quantum teleportation (no distillation strategies permitted) and compare their efficiencies in real world implementations. We show how one can improve the efficiency of many direct teleportation protocols by combining these techniques. We then develop new teleportation protocols employing multipartite partially entangled states. The three techniques are also used here in order to achieve the highest efficiency possible. Finally, we prove the upper bound for the optimal success rate for protocols based on partially entangled Bell states and show that some of the protocols here developed achieve such a bound.