Transfer of different types of optical qubits over a lossy environment

Abstract: We compare three different types of optical qubits for information transfer via quantum teleportation and direction transmission under photon losses. The three types of qubits are (1) qubits using the vacuum and the single-photon (VSP) states, (2) single-photon qubits using polarization degrees of freedom, i.e., polarized single-photon (PSP) qubits, and (3) coherent-state qubits that use two coherent states with opposite phases as the qubit basis. Our analysis shows that the teleportation scheme outperforms the direct transmission for most of cases as far as fidelities are concerned. Overall, VSP qubits are found to be the most efficient for both the direct transmission and teleportation under photon loss effects. The coherent-state qubits are more robust than PSP qubits either when their amplitudes are small as $|\alpha| \lesssim 1.22$ or when photon loss effects are strong. Our results would provide useful and timely information for the development of practical optical quantum information processing particularly in the context of hybrid architectures.