The Hidden Cost of Quantum Teleportation

The amount of information transferred during quantum teleportation is equal to the preparation information of the teleported state, rather than twice the entropy S, the classical communication required by standard teleportation. This is shown by noting that the information required to specify the operation that verifies the teleported state is identical to the preparation information, at the given level of precision m (in bits). Depending on the resolution of the projective Hilbert space, the preparation information can be made arbitrarily precise and hence indefinitely larger than 2S bits. Therefore, the classical communication is insufficient to account for the transfer of preparation information, which is then attributed to the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen channel. Some fundamental repercussions for relativistic quantum information processing are briefly discussed