In superdense teleportation of quantum information, Alice (near) selects a particular set of states to send to Bob (far), using the hyperentangled pair of photons they share. The possible states Alice may send are represented as the points on a donut shape, here artistically depicted in sharp relief from the cloudy silhouette of general quantum state that surrounds them. To transmit a state, Alice makes a measurement on her half of the entangled state, which has four possible outcomes shown by red, green, blue, and yellow points. She then communicates the outcome of her measurement (in this case, yellow, represented by the orange streak connecting the two donuts) to Bob using a classical information channel. Bob then can make a corrective rotation on his state to recover the state that Alice sent.
Credit: Image by Precision Graphics, copyright Paul Kwiat, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Putting a hole in the center of the donut -- a mid-nineteenth-century invention -- allows the deep-fried pastry to cook evenly, inside and out. As it turns out, the hole in the center of the donut also holds answers for a type of more efficient and reliable quantum information teleportation, a critical goal for quantum information science.
