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Experimental demonstration of five-photon entanglement and open-destination teleportation

Nature volume 430, pages 54–58 (2004)Cite this article

Abstract

Quantum-mechanical entanglement of three1,2 or four3,4 particles has been achieved experimentally, and has been used to demonstrate the extreme contradiction between quantum mechanics and local realism5,6. However, the realization of five-particle entanglement remains an experimental challenge. The ability to manipulate the entanglement of five or more particles is required7,8 for universal quantum error correction. Another key process in distributed quantum information processing9,10, similar to encoding and decoding, is a teleportation protocol11,12 that we term ‘open-destination’ teleportation. An unknown quantum state of a single particle is teleported onto a superposition of N particles; at a later stage, this teleported state can be read out (for further applications) at any of the N particles, by a projection measurement on the remaining particles. Here we report a proof-of-principle demonstration of five-photon entanglement and open-destination teleportation (for N = 3). In the experiment, we use two entangled photon pairs to generate a four-photon entangled state, which is then combined with a single-photon state. Our experimental methods can be used for investigations of measurement-based quantum computation9,10 and multi-party quantum communication13,14.

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Figure 1: Diagrams showing the principles of generating five-photon entanglement and of achieving open-destination teleportation.
Figure 2: Set-up for experimental demonstration of five-photon entanglement and open-destination teleportation.
Figure 3: Experimental results showing the procedure used to achieve perfect temporal overlap for photons 1 and 2 and for photons 3 and 4.
Figure 4: Experimental results for the observation of five-photon entanglement.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the National Fundamental Research Program and the German Research Foundation (DFG).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Modern Physics and Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at Microscale, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui, 230026, China

    Zhi Zhao, Yu-Ao Chen, An-Ning Zhang, Tao Yang & Jian-Wei Pan

  2. Institute for Theoretical Physics, University of Innsbruck, and Institute for Quantum Optics and Quantum Information, Austrian Academy of Sciences, A-6020, Innsbruck, Austria

    Hans J. Briegel

  3. Physikalisches Institut, Universität Heidelberg, Philosophenweg 12, D-69120, Heidelberg, Germany

    Jian-Wei Pan

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  1. Zhi Zhao
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Correspondence to Jian-Wei Pan.

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Zhao, Z., Chen, YA., Zhang, AN. et al. Experimental demonstration of five-photon entanglement and open-destination teleportation. Nature 430, 54–58 (2004). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature02643

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