Abstract: We present and experimentally demonstrate a communication protocol that employs shared entanglement to reduce errors when sending a bit over a particular noisy classical channel. Specifically, it is shown that given a single use of this channel, one can transmit a bit with higher success probability when the sender and receiver share entanglement compared to the best possible strategy when they do not. The experiment is realized using polarization-entangled photon pairs, whose quantum correlations play a critical role in both the encoding and decoding of the classical message. Experimentally, we find that a bit can be successfully transmitted with probability 0.891±0.002, which is close to the theoretical maximum of (2+2^-1/2)/3≈0.902 and is significantly above the optimal classical strategy, which yields 5/6≈0.833.

Update April 1, 2011: A Search and Discovery article, Entanglement enhances classical communication, by Johanna Miller was published in Physics Today…today.