Qudit-Teleportation for photons with linear optics

Abstract

Quantum teleportation, the transfer of the state of one quantum system to another without direct interaction between both systems, is an important way to transmit information encoded in quantum states and to generate quantum correlations (entanglement) between remote quantum systems. So far, for photons, only superpositions of two distinguishable states (one ‘‘qubit’’) could be teleported. Here we show how to teleport a ‘‘qudit’’, i.e. a superposition of an arbitrary number d of distinguishable states present in the orbital angular momentum of a single photon using d beam splitters and d additional entangled photons. The same entanglement resource might also be employed to collectively teleport the state of d/2 photons at the cost of one additional entangled photon per qubit. This is superior to existing schemes for photonic qubits, which require an additional pair of entangled photons per qubit.