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Experimental quantum teleportation

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Quantum teleportation — the transmission and reconstruction over arbitrary distances of the state of a quantum system — is demonstrated experimentally. During teleportation, an initial photon which carries the polarization that is to be transferred and one of a pair of entangled photons are subjected to a measurement such that the second photon of the entangled pair acquires the polarization of the initial photon. This latter photon can be arbitrarily far away from the initial one. Quantum teleportation will be a critical ingredient for quantum computation networks.

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Figure 1: Scheme showing principles involved in quantum teleportation (a) and the experimental set-up (b).
Figure 2: Photons emerging from type II down-conversion (see text).
Figure 3: Theoretical prediction for the three-fold coincidence probability between the two Bell-state detectors (f1, f2) and one of the detectors analysing the teleported state.
Figure 4: Experimental results.
Figure 5: Four-fold coincidence rates (without background subtraction).

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Acknowledgements

We thank C. Bennett, I. Cirac, J. Rarity, W. Wootters and P. Zoller for discussions, and M. Zukowski for suggestions about various aspects of the experiments. This work was supported by the Austrian Science Foundation FWF, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the TMR program of the European Union and the US NSF.

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  1. Institut für Experimentalphysik, Universität Innsbruck, Technikerstr. 25, A-6020 Innsbruck, Austria https://www.nature.com/nature

    Dik Bouwmeester, Jian-Wei Pan, Klaus Mattle, Manfred Eibl, Harald Weinfurter & Anton Zeilinger

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  1. Dik Bouwmeester
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  2. Jian-Wei Pan
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  3. Klaus Mattle
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  4. Manfred Eibl
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  5. Harald Weinfurter
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  6. Anton Zeilinger
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Correspondence to Dik Bouwmeester.

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Bouwmeester, D., Pan, JW., Mattle, K. et al. Experimental quantum teleportation. Nature 390, 575–579 (1997). https://doi.org/10.1038/37539

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