Experimental Demonstration of Counterfactual Quantum Communication
Yang Liu, Lei Ju, Xiao-Lei Liang, Shi-Biao Tang, Guo-Liang Shen Tu, Lei Zhou, Cheng-Zhi Peng, Kai Chen, Teng‐Yun Chen, Zeng‐Bing Chen, Jian-Wei Pan · Physical Review Letters · 2012
Quantum effects, besides offering substantial superiority in many tasks over classical methods, are also expected to provide interesting ways to establish secret keys between remote parties. A striking scheme called "counterfactual quantum cryptography" proposed by Noh [Phys. Rev. Lett. 103, 230501 (2009).] allows one to maintain secure key distributions, in which particles carrying secret information are seemingly not being transmitted through quantum channels. We have experimentally demonstrated, for the first time, a faithful implementation for such a scheme with an on-table realization operating at telecom wavelengths. To verify its feasibility for extension over a long distance, we have furthermore reported an illustration on a 1 km fiber. In both cases, high visibilities of more than 98% are achieved through active stabilization of interferometers. Our demonstration is crucial as a direct verification of such a remarkable application, and this procedure can become a key communication module for revealing fundamental physics through counterfactuals.