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Trace-free counterfactual communication with a nanophotonic processor

Author(s)
Arvidsson Shukur, David Roland; Harris, Nicholas Christopher; Prabhu, Mihika; Carolan, Jacques J; Englund, Dirk R.
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Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
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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.
Date issued
2019-07
URI
https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/129618
Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Research Laboratory of Electronics; Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
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
ISSN
2056-6387

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