Teleportation of the relativistic quantum field

The process of teleportation of a completely unknown one-particle state of a free relativistic quantum field is considered. In contrast to the non-relativistic quantum mechanics, the teleportation of an unknown state of the quantum field cannot be in principle described in terms of a measurement in a tensor product of two Hilbert spaces to which the unknown state and the state of the EPR-pair belong. The reason is of the existence of a cyclic (vacuum) state common to both the unknown state and the EPR-pair. Due to the common vacuum vector and the microcausality principle (commutation relations for the field operators), the teleportation amplitude contains inevitably contributions which are irrelevant to the teleportation process. Hence in the relativistic theory the teleportation in the sense it is understood in the non-relativistic quantum mechanics proves to be impossible because of the impossibility of the realization of the appropriate measurement as a tensor product of the measurements related to the individual subsystems so that one can only speak of the amplitude of the propagation of the field as a whole. (C) 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.