Optimal tests for continuous-variable quantum teleportation and photodetectors

Abstract: Quantum teleportation is a primitive in several important applications, including quantum communication, quantum computation, error correction, and quantum networks. In this work, we propose an optimal test for the performance of continuous-variable (CV) quantum teleportation in terms of the energy-constrained channel fidelity between ideal CV teleportation and its experimental implementation. Work prior to ours considered suboptimal tests of the performance of CV teleportation, focusing instead on its performance for particular states, such as ensembles of coherent states, squeezed states, cat states, etc. Here we prove that the optimal state for testing CV teleportation is an entangled superposition of twin Fock states. We establish this result by reducing the problem of estimating the energy-constrained channel fidelity between ideal CV teleportation and its experimental approximation to a quadratic program and solving it. As an additional result, we obtain an analytical solution to the energy-constrained diamond distance between a photodetector and its experimental approximation. These results are relevant for experiments that make use of CV teleportation and photodetectors.