Communication via one- and two-particle operators on Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen states

As is well known, operations on one particle of an Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) pair cannot influence the marginal statistics of measurements on the other particle. We characterize the set of states accessible from an initial EPR state by one-particle operations and show that in a sense they allow two bits to be encoded reliably in one spin-1/2 particle: One party, ‘‘Alice,’’ prepares an EPR pair and sends one of the particles to another party, ‘‘Bob,’’ who applies one of four unitary operators to the particle, and then returns it to Alice. By measuring the two particles jointly, Alice can now reliably learn which operator Bob used.