Experimental Demonstration of Five-photon Entanglement and Open-destination Teleportation

Universal quantum error-correction requires the ability of manipulating entanglement of five or more particles. Although entanglement of three or four particles has been experimentally demonstrated and used to obtain the extreme contradiction between quantum mechanics and local realism, the realization of five-particle entanglement remains an experimental challenge. Meanwhile, a crucial experimental challenge in multi-party quantum communication and computation is the so-called open-destination teleportation. During open-destination teleportation, an unknown quantum state of a single particle is first teleported onto a N-particle coherent superposition to perform distributed quantum information processing. At a later stage this teleported state can be readout at any of the N particles for further applications by performing a projection measurement on the remaining N-1 particles. Here, we report a proof-of-principle demonstration of five-photon entanglement and open-destination teleportation. 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 to achieve the experimental goals. The methods developed in our experiment would have various applications e.g. in quantum secret sharing and measurement-based quantum computation.