  The amount of information transmissible through a communications channel is
determined by the noise characteristics of the channel and by the quantities of
available transmission resources. In classical information theory, the amount
of transmissible information can be increased twice at most when the
transmission resource (e.g. the code length, the bandwidth, the signal power)
is doubled for fixed noise characteristics. In quantum information theory,
however, the amount of information transmitted can increase even more than
twice. We present a proof-of-principle demonstration of this super-additivity
of classical capacity of a quantum channel by using the ternary symmetric
states of a single photon, and by event selection from a weak coherent light
source. We also show how the super-additive coding gain, even in a small code
length, can boost the communication performance of conventional coding
technique.
