Activating hidden teleportation power: Theory and experiment

Ideal quantum teleportation transfers an unknown quantum state intact from one party Alice to the other Bob via the use of a maximally entangled state and the communication of classical information. If Alice and Bob do not share entanglement, the maximal average fidelity between the state to be teleported and the state received, according to a classical measure-and-prepare scheme, is upper bounded by a function fc that is inversely proportional to the Hilbert space dimension. In fact, even if they share entanglement, the so-called teleportation fidelity may still be less than the classical threshold fc. For two-qubit entangled states, conditioned on a successful local filtering, the teleportation fidelity can always be activated, i.e., boosted beyond fc. Here, for all dimensions larger than two, we show that the teleportation power hidden in a subset of entangled two-qudit Werner states can also be activated. In addition, we show that an entire family of two-qudit rank-deficient states violates the reduction criterion of separability, and thus their teleportation power is either above the classical threshold or can be activated. Using hybrid entanglement prepared in photon pairs, we also provide the first proof-of-principle experimental demonstration of the activation of teleportation power hidden in this latter family of qubit states. The connection between the possibility of activating hidden teleportation power with the closely-related problem of entanglement distillation is discussed.