Experimental Quantum Error-Free Transmission

TL;DR

This paper introduces an economical and practical method for error-free quantum information transmission that uses time-bin encoding and error rejection, demonstrated over a 0.8 km optical fiber, advancing quantum communication.

Contribution

The paper presents a resource-efficient approach for quantum EFT using time-bin encoding and error rejection, suitable for entanglement distribution in real-world networks.

Findings

Successfully transmitted entanglement over 0.8 km fiber

Achieved error rejection using time-bin encoding

Simplified quantum EFT implementation

Abstract

Error-free transmission (EFT) of quantum information is a crucial ingredient in quantum communication network. To overcome the unavoidable decoherence in noisy channel, to date, many efforts have focused on faithfully transmitting one state by consuming large numbers of synchronized ancillary states. However, huge demands of quantum resources are hard to meet with current technology, thus restrict practical applications. Here we propose and demonstrate an economical method of reliably transmitting quantum information. An arbitrary unknown quantum state is converted into time bins deterministically in terms of its own polarization using a modified Franson interferometer. Any arisen noise in channel will induce an associated error to the reference frame of the time bins, which can be utilized to reject errors and recover the initial state. By virtue of state-independent feature, our method can be applied to entanglement distribution. After passing through 0.8 km randomly twisted optical fiber, the entanglement still survives and is verified. Our approach significantly simplifies the implementation of quantum EFT and enables a general quantum state even entanglement to be protected by feedback, thus can be used as a basic building block in practical long-distance quantum communication network.