Teleportation and dense coding with genuine multipartite entanglement

We present an explicit protocol E0 for faithfully teleporting an arbitrary two-qubit state via a genuine four-qubit entangled state. By construction, our four-partite state is not reducible to a pair of Bell states. Its properties are compared and contrasted with those of the four-party Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger and W states. We also give a dense coding scheme D0 involving our state as a shared resource of entanglement. Both D0 and E0 indicate that our four-qubit state is a likely candidate for the genuine four-partite analogue to a Bell state.