We investigate the effect of noise on a class of four-qubit entangled channels for two-qubit teleportation from Alice to Bob. These entangled channels include both parallel Bell pairs and inseparable channels with genuine multipartite entanglement. For the situation where only Bob’s share of the entangled channel is subject to decoherence, we show by deriving a general expression for the teleported state that teleportation using noisy inseparable channels is equivalent to teleportation using noisy Bell pairs. When Alice’s qubits are also subject to noise, we find that the inseparable channels never give a higher teleportation fidelity than Bell pairs, even in the presence of collective noise. Our results can shed some light on practical two-qubit teleportation.

• Received 25 December 2009

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.81.054302