nt - p h / 03 02 17 9 v 1 25 F eb 2 00 3 Teleportation with a uniformly accelerated partner Paul

The large and rapidly growing field of quantum information science is a vindication of Landauer’s insistence that we recognize the physical basis of information storage, processing and communication[1]. Quantum information science is based on the discovery that there are physical states of a quantum system which enable tasks that cannot be accomplished in a classical world. An important example of such a task is quantum teleportation[2]. Teleportation, like most recent ideas in quantum information science, is based squarely on the physical properties of non-relativistic quantum systems. Recognizing that information science must be grounded in our understanding of the physical world, one is prompted to ask how relativistic considerations might impact tasks that rely on quantum entangled states. There has recently been some interest in this question for inertial frames. While Lorentz transformations cannot change the overall quantum entanglement of a bipartite state[3, 4], they can change which properties of the local systems are entangled. In particular, Gingrich and Adami[5] showed that under a Lorentz transformation the initial entanglement of just the spin degrees of freedom of two spin half particles can be transferred into an entanglement between both the spin and momentum degrees of freedom. Physically this means that detectors, which respond only to spin degrees of freedom, will see a reduction of entanglement when they are moving at large uniform velocity. Put simply, the nature of the entanglement resource depends on the inertial reference frame of the detectors. A similar result holds for photons[6] In this paper however, we wish to consider quantum entanglement in non-inertial frames. In order to make the discussion physically relevant, we concentrate on a particular quantum information task; quantum teleportation. We will show that the fidelity of teleportation is