Cao Yuan, Li Yu-Huai, Cao Zhu, Yin Juan, Chen Yu-Ao, Yin Hua-Lei, Chen Teng-Yun, Ma Xiongfeng, Peng Cheng-Zhi, Pan Jian-Wei
Shanghai Branch, National Laboratory for Physical Sciences at Microscale and Department of Modern Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Shanghai 201315, China.
Synergetic Innovation Center of Quantum Information and Quantum Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, Anhui 230026, China.
Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2017 May 9;114(19):4920-4924. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1614560114. Epub 2017 Apr 25.
Intuition from our everyday lives gives rise to the belief that information exchanged between remote parties is carried by physical particles. Surprisingly, in a recent theoretical study [Salih H, Li ZH, Al-Amri M, Zubairy MS (2013) 110:170502], quantum mechanics was found to allow for communication, even without the actual transmission of physical particles. From the viewpoint of communication, this mystery stems from a (nonintuitive) fundamental concept in quantum mechanics-wave-particle duality. All particles can be described fully by wave functions. To determine whether light appears in a channel, one refers to the amplitude of its wave function. However, in counterfactual communication, information is carried by the phase part of the wave function. Using a single-photon source, we experimentally demonstrate the counterfactual communication and successfully transfer a monochrome bitmap from one location to another by using a nested version of the quantum Zeno effect.
我们日常生活中的直觉让人们相信，远程方之间交换的信息是由物理粒子携带的。令人惊讶的是，在最近的一项理论研究中[萨利赫·H、李ZH、阿勒阿姆里·M、祖巴里·MS（2013年）110:170502]，人们发现量子力学允许通信，即使没有物理粒子的实际传输。从通信的角度来看，这个谜团源于量子力学中的一个（非直观的）基本概念——波粒二象性。所有粒子都可以用波函数完全描述。要确定光是否出现在一个通道中，人们会参考其波函数的振幅。然而，在反事实通信中，信息是由波函数的相位部分携带的。我们使用单光子源通过实验证明了反事实通信，并通过使用量子芝诺效应的嵌套版本成功地将一幅单色位图从一个位置传输到了另一个位置。
