Environment-assisted quantum-information correction for continuous variables

Quantum-information protocols are inevitably affected by decoherence which is associated with the leakage of quantum information into an environment. In this article we address the possibility of recovering the quantum information from an environmental measurement. We investigate continuous-variable quantum information, and we propose a simple environmental measurement that under certain circumstances fully restores the quantum information of the signal state although the state is not reconstructed with unit fidelity. We implement the protocol for which information is encoded into conjugate quadratures of coherent states of light and the noise added under the decoherence process is of Gaussian nature. The correction protocol is tested using both a deterministic as well as a probabilistic strategy. The potential use of the protocol in a continuous-variable quantum-key distribution scheme as a means to combat excess noise is also investigated. ©2010 The American Physical Society