Direct counterfactual communication via quantum Zeno effect
Yuan Wen Cao, Yu-Huai Li, Zhu Cao, Juan Yin, Yu-Ao Chen, Hua‐Lei Yin, Teng‐Yun Chen, Xiongfeng Ma, Cheng-Zhi Peng, Jian-Wei Pan · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2017
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.