Entangled coherent states versus entangled photon pairs for practical quantum information processing

TL;DR

This paper compares entangled coherent states and entangled photon pairs in quantum teleportation, highlighting their advantages and disadvantages under realistic decoherence and detection inefficiency conditions.

Contribution

It provides a comparative analysis of ECSs and EPPs, revealing their respective strengths and weaknesses for practical quantum information processing.

Findings

ECSs outperform EPPs under heavy photon loss in fidelity and success probability.

ECS-based teleportation suffers from undetected errors with inefficient detectors.

EPP-based teleportation maintains fidelity better under detector inefficiency.

Abstract

We compare effects of decoherence and detection inefficiency on entangled coherent states (ECSs) and entangled photon pairs (EPPs), both of which are known to be particularly useful for quantum information processing (QIP). When decoherence effects caused by photon losses are heavy, the ECSs outperform the EPPs as quantum channels for teleportation both in fidelities and in success probabilities. On the other hand, when inefficient detectors are used, the teleportation scheme using the ECSs suffers undetected errors that result in the degradation of fidelity, while this is not the case for the teleportation scheme using the EPPs. Our study reveals the merits and demerits of the two types of entangled states in realizing practical QIP under realistic conditions.