English

Carrying an arbitrarily large amount of information using a single quantum particle

Quantum Physics 2020-09-02 v2

Abstract

Theoretically speaking, a photon can travel arbitrarily long before it enters into a detector, resulting a click. How much information can a photon carry? We study a bipartite asymmetric "two-way signaling" protocol as an extension of that proposed by Del Santo and Daki\'{c}. Suppose that Alice and Bob are distant from each other and each of them has an nn-bit string. They are tasked to exchange the information of their local n-bit strings with each other, using only a single photon during the communication. It has been shown that the superposition of different spatial locations in a Mach-Zehnder (MZ) interferometer enables bipartite local encodings. We show that, after the travel of a photon through a cascade of nn-level MZ interferometers in our protocol, the one of Alice or Bob whose detector clicks can access the other's full information of nn-bit string, while the other can gain one-bit of information. That is, the wave-particle duality makes two-way signaling possible, and a single photon can carry arbitrarily large (but finite) information.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2002.10374,
  title  = {Carrying an arbitrarily large amount of information using a single quantum particle},
  author = {Li-Yi Hsu and Ching-Yi Lai and You-Chia Chang and Chien-Ming Wu and Ray-Kuang Lee},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2002.10374},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

6 pages, 6 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-23T13:51:56.294Z