Catalytic quantum teleportation and beyond

Abstract: We address fundamental limitations of quantum teleportation -- the process of transferring quantum information using classical communication and preshared entanglement. We develop a new teleportation protocol based upon the idea of using ancillary entanglement catalytically, i.e. without depleting it. This protocol is then used to show that catalytic entanglement allows for a noiseless quantum channel to be simulated with a quality that could never be achieved using only entanglement from the shared state, even for catalysts with a small dimension. On the one hand, this allows for a more faithful transmission of quantum information using generic states and a fixed amount of consumed entanglement. On the other hand, this shows, for the first time, that entanglement catalysis provides a genuine advantage in a generic quantum-information processing task. Finally, we show that similar ideas can be directly applied to study quantum catalysis for more general problems in quantum mechanics. As an application, we show that catalysts can activate so-called passive states, a concept that finds widespread application e.g. in quantum thermodynamics.