Experimental demonstration that qubits can be cloned at will, if encrypted with a single-use decryption key
The no-cloning theorem forbids the creation of identical copies of qubits, thereby imposing strong limitations on quantum technologies. A recently-proposed protocol, encrypted cloning, showed, however, that the creation of perfect clones is theoretically possible - if the clones are simultaneously encrypted with a single-use decryption key. It has remained an open question, however, whether encrypted cloning is stable under hardware noise and thus practical as a quantum primitive. This is nontrivial because spreading quantum information widely could dilute it until barely exceeding the noise level, leading to catastrophic fidelity decay. Given the complexity of hardware noise, theory and classical simulation are insufficient to settle this. Here, we settle this question experimentally, on IBM Heron-R2 superconducting processors using up to 154 qubits. We find that encrypted cloning is stable under hardware noise, even when used as a module, namely in parallel, series or interleaved, while preserving pre-existing entanglement. This establishes it as a versatile quantum primitive for practical use, and it necessitates a refinement to our understanding of the no-cloning theorem: quantum information can be spread at will, in theory and in practice, without dilution or degradation, if encrypted or obscured. The actual constraint is that the decryption mechanism must be single-use.