Thermal effects on quantum communication through spin chains (7 pages)

We study the effect of thermal fluctuations in a recently proposed protocol for transmission of unknown quantum states through quantum spin chains. We develop a low-temperature expansion for general spin chains. We then apply this formalism to study exactly thermal effects on short spin chains of four spins. We show that optimal times for extraction of output states are almost independent of the temperature, which lowers only the fidelity of the channel. Moreover we show that thermal effects are smaller in the antiferromagnetic chains than the ferromagnetic ones.