Trace-free counterfactual communication with a nanophotonic processor
Name
s41534-019-0179-2.pdf
Description
Published version
Size
1.1 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
a6f9ff7253e3e7904ccacff2cda65e61
Author(s)
Arvidsson Shukur, David Roland
Harris, Nicholas Christopher
Prabhu, Mihika
Carolan, Jacques J
Englund, Dirk R.
Date Issued
July 2019
Journal
npj Quantum Information
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Citation
Calafell, I. Alonso et al. “Trace-free counterfactual communication with a nanophotonic processor.” npj Quantum Information, 5, 1 (July 2019): 61 © 2019 The Author(s)
Version
Final published version
Abstract
In standard communication information is carried by particles or waves. Counterintuitively, in counterfactual communication particles and information can travel in opposite directions. The quantum Zeno effect allows Bob to transmit a message to Alice by encoding information in particles he never interacts with. A first remarkable protocol for counterfactual communication relied on thousands of ideal optical operations for high success rate performance. Experimental realizations of that protocol have thus employed post-selection to demonstrate counterfactuality. This post-selection, together with arguments concerning a so-called “weak trace” of the particles traveling from Bob to Alice, have led to a discussion regarding the counterfactual nature of the protocol. Here we circumvent these controversies, implementing a new, and fundamentally different, protocol in a programmable nanophotonic processor, based on reconfigurable silicon-on-insulator waveguides that operate at telecom wavelengths. This, together with our telecom single-photon source and highly efficient superconducting nanowire single-photon detectors, provides a versatile and stable platform for a high-fidelity implementation of counterfactual communication with single photons, allowing us to actively tune the number of steps in the Zeno measurement, and achieve a bit error probability below 1%, without post-selection and with a vanishing weak trace. Our demonstration shows how our programmable nanophotonic processor could be applied to more complex counterfactual tasks and quantum information protocols.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Research Laboratory of Electronics
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1038/S41534-019-0179-2
