arXiv2014
Quantum teleportation provides a "disembodied" way to transfer quantum states from one object to another at a distant location, assisted by priorly shared entangled states and a classical communication channel. In addition to its fundamental interest, teleportation has been recognized as an important element in long-distance quantum communication, distributed quantum networks and measurement-based quantum computation. There have been numerous demonstrations of teleportation in different physical systems such as photons, atoms, ions, electrons, and superconducting circuits. Yet, all the previous experiments were limited to teleportation of one degree of freedom (DoF) only. However, a single quantum particle can naturally possess various DoFs -- internal and external -- and with coherent coupling among them. A fundamental open challenge is to simultaneously teleport multiple DoFs, which is necessary to fully describe a quantum particle, thereby truly teleporting it intactly. Here, we demonstrate the first teleportation of the composite quantum states of a single photon encoded in both the spin and orbital angular momentum. We develop a method to project and discriminate hyper-entangled Bell states exploiting probabilistic quantum non-demolition measurement, which can be extended to more DoFs. We verify the teleportation for both spin-orbit product states and hybrid entangled state, and achieve a teleportation fidelity ranging from 0.57 to 0.68, above the classical limit. Our work moves a step toward teleportation of more complex quantum systems, and demonstrates an enhanced capability for scalable quantum technologies.