Power of entanglement in quantum communication

Abstract

A communication channel is a physical system that transfers information from one place to another. Examples of communication channels include wires, optical fibers, and chains of spins that propagate spin waves through a medium. This Letter shows that the power-limited communication capacity of a multimode optical fiber or a set of parallel spin chains can be enhanced by introducing nonlinear couplings between the modes or chains. In particular, M coupled, entangled modes can send M bits in the same time it takes a single mode to send a single bit, and in the same time it takes M uncoupled, unentangled modes to send sqrt[M] bits.