Quantum Teleportation Between Discrete and Continuous Encodings of an Optical Qubit

The transfer of quantum information between physical systems of a different nature is a central matter in quantum technologies. Particularly challenging is the transfer between discrete and continuous degrees of freedom of various harmonic oscillator systems. Here we implement a protocol for teleporting a continuous-variable optical qubit, encoded by means of low-amplitude coherent states, onto a discrete-variable, single-rail qubit-a superposition of the vacuum and single-photon optical states-via a hybrid entangled resource. We test our protocol on a one-dimensional manifold of the input qubit space and demonstrate the mapping onto the equator of the teleported qubit's Bloch sphere with an average fidelity of 0.83±0.04. Our work opens up the way to the wide application of quantum information processing techniques where discrete- and continuous-variable encodings are combined within the same optical circuit.