Quantum energy teleportation with an electromagnetic field: Discrete versus continuous variables

It is well known that usual quantum teleportation protocols cannot transport energy. Recently, new protocols called quantum energy teleportation (QET) have been proposed, which transport energy by local operations and classical communication with the ground states of many-body quantum systems. In this paper, we compare two different QET protocols for transporting energy with the electromagnetic field. In the first protocol, a 1/2 spin (a qubit) is coupled with the quantum fluctuation in the vacuum state and measured in order to obtain one-bit information about the fluctuation for the teleportation. In the second protocol, a harmonic oscillator is coupled with the fluctuation and measured in order to obtain continuous-variable information about the fluctuation. In the spin protocol, the amount of teleported energy is suppressed by an exponential damping factor when the amount of input energy increases. This suppression factor becomes power damping in the case of the harmonic oscillator protocol. Therefore, it is concluded that obtaining more information about the quantum fluctuation leads to teleporting more energy. This result suggests a profound relationship between energy and quantum information.