Quantum Teleportation Coexisting with Conventional Classical Communications in Optical Fiber

Abstract

The ability for quantum and classical networks to operate in the same optical fibers would aid the deployment of quantum network technology. However, quantum performance can be susceptible to noise photons generated by spontaneous Raman scattering of high-power coexisting classical light. Quantum teleportation is a fundamental operation in quantum networking, but has yet to be demonstrated in fibers populated with high data rate conventional optical signals. In this paper, we demonstrate a three-node quantum state teleportation system coexisting with 400-Gbps C-band classical communications in 30.2 km of fiber. To protect quantum fidelity, Raman noise rates are suppressed using optimized O-band quantum channels and filtering in multiple degrees of freedom. Fidelity is shown to be well maintained with elevated classical powers as high as 18.7 dBm, which could support multiple classical channels with many terabits/s aggregate data rates. These results show the feasibility of advanced quantum and classical network applications operating within a unified fiber infrastructure.