Threshold quantum secret sharing of secure direct communication

We propose a (t, n)-threshold quantum secret sharing protocol of secure direct communication following some ideas of Zhang's protocol [Phys. Lett. A 342 (2005) 60] and Tokunaga et al.'s protocol [Phys. Rev. A 71 (2005) 012314]. The sender distributes the classical secret shares to his or her n agents and each agent owns a secret share in advance. The sender's secure direct communication message can be extracted by an agent subset by collaboration in such a way that at least t or more agents can obtain the secret message with the mutual assistances but any t - 1 or fewer agents cannot. In contrast to the previous multiparty quantum secret sharing protocols in which the sender's secret message can be recovered only if all the agents collaborate, our protocol is more practical and more flexible.