Quantum teleportation of qudits is revisited. In particular, we analyze the case where the quantum channel corresponds to a nonmaximally entangled state and show that the success of the protocol is directly related to the problem of distinguishing nonorthogonal quantum states. The teleportation channel can be seen as a coherent superposition of two channels, one of them being a maximally entangled state, thus leading to perfect teleportation, and the other, corresponding to a nonmaximally entangled state living in a subspace of the d-dimensional Hilbert space. The second channel leads to a teleported state with reduced fidelity. We calculate the average fidelity of the process and show its optimality.

• Received 3 April 2003

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.68.022310