Quantum Full-Duplex Communication

Integrating the full-duplex capability with quantum communication potentially equips emerging wireless networks with a quantum layer of security for the stringent communication efficiency and security requirements. This paper proposes two new full-duplex quantum communication protocols to exchange classical or quantum information between two remote parties simultaneously without transferring a physical particle over the quantum channel. The first protocol, called quantum duplex coding, enables the exchange of a classical bit using a preshared maximally entangled pair of qubits by means of counterfactual disentanglement. The second protocol, called quantum telexchanging, enables the exchange of an arbitrary unknown qubit without using preshared entanglement by means of counterfactual entanglement and disentanglement. We demonstrate that quantum duplex coding and quantum telexchanging can be achieved by exploiting counterfactual electron-photon interaction gates. It is shown that these tasks can be viewed as full-duplex transmission of bits and qubits via binary erasure channels and quantum erasure channels, respectively.