Abstract Entanglement-assisted quantum communication has substantial advantages in surpassing the power of classical communication by utilizing the entangled state. Up to now, most of entanglement-assisted quantum communications with dense coding are limited to the proof-of-principle experiments. Here, we experimentally demonstrate the deterministic entanglement-assisted quantum communication based on the continuous-variable (CV) entangled state over 20 km commercial fiber channels. We propose a new CV dense coding scheme with improved classical signals and show that the transmission distance of CV entanglement-assisted quantum communication can be extended compared with that using fixed classical signals. By applying the frequency division multiplexing technique, we simultaneously decode 10 classical signals submerged in the shot noise of coherent state with the help of CV entangled state after the transmission through a 20.121 km fiber channel. The results show that around 3 times of channel capacity in classical communication with coherent state are achieved in the CV entanglement-assisted communication with the frequency division multiplexing technique. Our result takes a crucial step towards realizing the deterministic metropolitan entanglement-assisted quantum communication in practical quantum channels.
Ren et al. (Fri,) studied this question.