The effect of a non-zero spontaneous decay rate on teleportation

Abstract

We discuss the influence of the spontaneous decay rate of the excited state on teleportation of the atomic state via cavity decay in the scheme of Bose et al (Bose S, Knight P L, Plenio M B and Vedral V 1999 Phys. Rev. Lett. 83 5158). We show that even a small but non-zero decay rate of the excited state leads to significant effects such as lowering the probability of successful teleportation if the product of the saturation parameter and the spontaneous decay rate is not negligible in comparison with the cavity mode decay rate. We compare analytical results obtained using adiabatic elimination with the results calculated numerically.