To share and not share a singlet: control qubit and nonclassicality in teleportation

The superposition principle provides us the opportunity to unfold many surprising facts. One such fact leads to the generation of entanglement which may allow one to teleport an unknown quantum state from one location to another. We try to understand the role of superposition in the process of quantum teleportation, as a question of potentially fundamental importance. We consider, within the scenario of quantum teleportation, a set-up where the sender and the receiver are in a superposed situation of using a maximally entangled state and not using any entangled state in the teleportation protocol, controlled by a qubit. We address two distinct protocols: in the first case, the sender and the receiver do nothing when they do not have the authority to use entanglement, while in the second case, they still use classical communication even if they do not use entanglement. After accomplishing the protocols, we operate a Hadamard gate on the control qubit, measure the control qubit's state, and consider the outcome corresponding to a particular state of the control. We compare the protocol's fidelity with the maximum fidelity achievable through a random guess or via utilizing classical resources only. In particular, we provide conditions to achieve nonclassical fidelity in teleportation, in the presence of the control qubit. To explore if there is any quantum advantage (advantage of superposition present in the control qubit), we compare the fidelities of the control qubit-based protocols with the fidelity achieved in a situation where the two parties are in a classical mixture of using and not using the maximally entangled state. We observe that there exists a wide range of parameters defining the initial state of the control qubit for which our protocols provide quantum advantage. To analyze the role of superposition quantitatively, we discuss whether the amount of quantum advantage can be expressed in terms of quantum coherence present in the state of the control qubit.