Reversible quantum operations and their application to teleportation

Quantum operations provide a general description of the state changes allowed by quantum mechanics. Simple necessary and sufficient conditions for an ideal quantum operation to be reversible by a unitary operation are derived in this paper. These results generalize recent work on reversible measurements by Mabuchi and Zoller [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 76}, 3108 (1996)]. Quantum teleportation can be understood as a special case of the problem of reversing quantum operations. We characterize completely teleportation schemes of the type proposed by Bennett {\it et al.} [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 70}, 1895 (1993)].