In quantum teleportation, a pair of entangled photons are prerequisite to serve as the quantum channel for quantum state transfer distantly. Here, we report a new strategy of quantum-teleportation-inspired classical optical imaging, which also works non-locally at a distance; however, only a classically correlated light source is used instead of entanglement. In our experiment, we explore the pseudo-thermal light source to offer the teleportation-like channel and employ the sum-frequency generation to perform the Bell-like state measurement. We successfully demonstrate the teleportation-inspired optical imaging of simple characters, Taiji diagram, and the superposition of orbital angular momentum modes. Moreover, we experimentally observe that a better coherence of pseudo-thermal light will result in a lower contrast of the formed images, and thus revealing that non-zero quantum discord offered by pseudo-thermal light, regardless of zero entanglement, plays the pivotal role in sustaining the teleportation-like channel for imaging at a distance.
@article{arxiv.2602.01272,
title = {Discord-Enabled Teleportation-Inspired Optical Imaging at a Distance},
author = {Zilin Chen and Weiqian Shu and Xiaodong Qiu and Yangjian Cai and Lixiang Chen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.01272},
year = {2026}
}