Teleportation and Dense Coding with Genuine Multipartite Entanglement

We present an explicit protocol ${\cal E}_0$ for faithfully teleporting an arbitrary two-qubit state via a genunie four-qubit entangled state. By construction, our four-partite state is not reducible to a pair of Bell states. Its properties are compared and contrasted with those of the four-party GHZ and W states. We also give a dense coding scheme ${\cal D}_0$ involving our state as a shared resource of entanglement. Both ${\cal D}_0$ and ${\cal E}_0$ indicate that our four-qubit state is a likely candidate for the genunine four-partite analogue to a Bell state.