Paper detail

How many runs ensure quantum fidelity in teleportation experiment?

The strong law of large numbers asserts that experimentally obtained mean values, in the limit of number of repetitions of the experiment going to infinity, converges almost surely to the theoretical predictions which are based on a priori assumed constant values for probabilities of the random events. Hence in most theoretical calculations, we implicitly neglect fluctuations around the mean. However in practice, we can repeat the experiment only finitely many times, and hence fluctuations are inevitable, and may lead to erroneous judgments. It is theoretically possible to teleport an unknown quantum state, using entanglement, with unit fidelity. The experimentally achieved values are however sub-unit, and often, significantly so. We show that when the number of repetitions of the experiment is small, there is significant probability of achieving a sub-unit experimentally achieved quantum teleportation fidelity that uses entanglement, even classically, i.e., without using entanglement. We further show that only when the number of repetitions of the experiment is of the order of a few thousands, the probability of a classical teleportation process to reach the currently achieved experimental quantum teleportation fidelities becomes negligibly small, and hence ensure that the experimentally obtained fidelities are due to genuine use of the shared entanglements.