Demonstrating multipartite entanglement of single-particle W states: linear optical schemes

We present two linear optical schemes using nonideal photodetectors to demonstrate inseparability of W-type N-partite entangled states containing only a single photon. First, we show that the pairwise entanglement of arbitrary two modes chosen from N optical modes can be detected using the method proposed by Nha and Kim [Phys. Rev. A 74, 012317 (2006)], thereby suggesting the full inseparability among N parties. In particular, this scheme is found to succeed for any nonzero quantum efficiency of photodetectors. Second, we consider a quantum teleportation network using linear optics without auxiliary modes. The conditional teleportation can be optimized by a suitable choice of the transmittance of the beam splitter in the Bell measurement. Specifically, we identify the conditions under which maximum fidelity larger than classical bound 2/3 is achieved only in cooperation with other parties. We also investigate the case of on-off photodetectors that cannot discriminate the number of detected photons.Comment: 5.5 pages, 2 figures, published version with slight modification

Secure sequential transmission of quantum information

We propose a quantum communication protocol that can be used to transmit any quantum state, one party to another via several intermediate nodes, securely on quantum communication network. The scheme makes use of the sequentially chained and approximate version of private quantum channels satisfying certain commutation relation of $n$-qubit Pauli operations. In this paper, we study the sequential structure, security analysis, and efficiency of the quantum sequential transmission (QST) protocol in depth.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur