Counterfactual Full-Duplex Communication

Abstract: This paper proposes two new full-duplex quantum communication protocols to exchange classical or quantum information between two remote parties simultaneously without transferring a physical particle over the quantum channel. The first protocol, called quantum duplex coding, enables to exchange of a classical bit using a preshared maximally entangled pair of qubits by means of counterfactual disentanglement. The second protocol, called quantum telexchanging, enables to exchange an arbitrary unknown qubit without using preshared entanglement by means of counterfactual entanglement and disentanglement. We demonstrate the quantum duplex coding and quantum telexchanging by exploiting counterfactual electron-photon interaction gates and show that these quantum duplex communication protocols form full-duplex binary erasure channel and quantum erasure channels, respectively.