Quantum secure direct communication over the collective amplitude damping channel

An efficient quantum secure direct communication protocol is presented over the amplitude damping channel. The protocol encodes logical bits in two-qubit noiseless states, and so it can function over a quantum channel subjected to collective amplitude damping. The feature of this protocol is that the sender encodes the secret directly on the quantum states, the receiver decodes the secret by performing determinate measurements, and there is no basis mismatch. The transmission’s safety is ensured by the nonorthogonality of the noiseless states traveling forward and backward on the quantum channel. Moreover, we construct the efficient quantum circuits to implement channel encoding and information encoding by means of primitive operations in quantum computation. Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 60873191 and 60821001), the Specialized Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education (Grant No. 200800131016), the Natural Science Foundation of Beijing (Grant No. 4072020), the National Laboratory for Modern Communications Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 9140C1101010601), and the ISN Open Foundation