When Entanglement Meets Classical Communications: Quantum Teleportation for the Quantum Internet

Abstract

Quantum Teleportation is the key communication functionality of the Quantum Internet, allowing the "transmission" of qubits without the physical transfer of the particle storing the qubit. Quantum teleportation is facilitated by the action of quantum entanglement, a somewhat counter-intuitive physical phenomenon with no direct counterpart in the classical word. As a consequence, the very concept of the classical communication system model has to be redesigned to account for the peculiarities of quantum teleportation. This redesign is a crucial prerequisite for constructing any effective quantum communication protocol. The aim of this manuscript is to shed light on this key concept, with the objective of allowing the reader: i) to appreciate the fundamental differences between the transmission of classical information versus the teleportation of quantum information; ii) to understand the communications functionalities underlying quantum teleportation, and to grasp the challenges in the design and practical employment of these functionalities; iii) to acknowledge that quantum information is subject to the deleterious effects of a noise process termed as quantum decoherence. This imperfection has no direct counterpart in the classical world; iv) to recognize how to contribute to the design and employment of the Quantum Internet.

Towards a distributed quantum computing ecosystem

“…1, pp. [3][4][5][6][7][8] This is an open access article published by the IET under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/) processor design based on the distributed quantum computing paradigm. Within the envisioned ecosystem, the lowest layers integrate the Quantum Internet as the fundamental underlying infrastructure providing networking and communication functionalities among remote quantum devices.…”

“…2, we can conceptualise a service that provides a set of remote operations based on teleported gates. Such service will directly interact with the physical system, exploiting the entanglement generation and distribution functionality [3].…”

“…Nowadays, a tremendous amount of heterogeneous players entered the quantum race, ranging from tech giants -such as IBM and Google in fierce competition to build a commercial quantum computer -to states and governments, with massive public funds to be distributed over the next years [1][2][3][4].…”

“…Conversely, a qubit can be in an extra mode – called superposition – i.e. it can be in a combination of the two basic states [2, 3].…”

Guest Editorial Advances in Quantum Communications, Computing, Cryptography, and Sensing

“…A 1998 snapshot of the quantum information theory is captured by [21] in the special issue of the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory marking the 50th anniversary of Shannon's seminal work. A gentle introduction to the topics in this section, including the deleterious effects of quantum decoherence, is provided in [22]. An historic perspective on the duality of classical and quantum error correction codes is offered in [23], along with an easy-reading introduction to quantum channels.…”