Teleportation of a Schrödinger's-Cat State via Satellite-based Quantum Communications

Abstract

The Schrödinger's-cat state is created from the macroscopic superposition of coherent states and is well-known to be a useful resource for quantum information processing protocols. In order to extend such protocols to a global scale, we study the continuous variable (CV) teleportation of the cat state via a satellite in low-Earth-orbit. Past studies have shown that the quantum character of the cat state can be preserved after CV teleportation, even when taking into account the detector efficiency. However, the channel transmission loss has not been taken into consideration. Traditionally, optical fibers with fixed attenuation are used as teleportation channels. Our results show that in such a setup, the quantum character of the cat state is lost after 5dB of channel loss. We then investigate the free-space channel between the Earth and a satellite, where the loss is caused by atmospheric turbulence. For a down-link channel of less than 500km and 30dB of loss, we find that the teleported state preserves higher fidelity relative to a fixed attenuation channel. The results in this work will be important for deployments over Earth-Satellite channels of protocols dependent on cat-state qubits.