No Arabic abstract
Quantum superpositions of distinct coherent states in a single-mode harmonic oscillator, known as cat states, have been an elegant demonstration of Schrodingers famous cat paradox. Here, we realize a two-mode cat state of electromagnetic fields in two microwave cavities bridged by a superconducting artificial atom, which can also be viewed as an entangled pair of single-cavity cat states. We present full quantum state tomography of this complex cat state over a Hilbert space exceeding 100 dimensions via quantum non-demolition measurements of the joint photon number parity. The ability to manipulate such multi-cavity quantum states paves the way for logical operations between redundantly encoded qubits for fault-tolerant quantum computation and communication.
The superposition principle is one of the main tenets of quantum mechanics. Despite its counter-intuitiveness, it has been experimentally verified using electrons, photons, atoms, and molecules. However, a similar experimental demonstration using a nano or a micro particle is non-existent. Here in this Letter, exploiting macroscopic quantum coherence and quantum tunneling, we propose an experiment using levitated magnetic nanoparticle to demonstrate such an effect. It is shown that the spatial separation between the delocalized wavepackets of a $20~$nm ferrimagnetic yttrium iron garnet (YIG) nanoparticle can be as large as $5~$$mu$m. We argue that this large spatial separation can be used to test different modifications such as collapse models to the standard quantum mechanics. Furthermore, we show that the spatial superposition of a core-shell structure, a YIG core and a non-magnetic silica shell, can be used to probe quantum gravity.
Given a source of two coherent state superpositions with small separation in a traveling wave optical setting, we show that by interference and balanced homodyne measurement it is possible to conditionally prepare a symmetrically placed superposition of coherent states around the origo of the phase space. The separation of the coherent states in the superposition will be amplified during the process.
When two equal photon-number states are combined on a balanced beam splitter, both output ports of the beam splitter contain only even numbers of photons. Consider the time-reversal of this interference phenomenon: the probability that a pair of photon-number-resolving detectors at the output ports of a beam splitter both detect the same number of photons depends on the overlap between the input state of the beam splitter and a state containing only even photon numbers. Here, we propose using this even-parity detection to engineer quantum states containing only even photon-number terms. As an example, we demonstrate the ability to prepare superpositions of two coherent states with opposite amplitudes, i.e. two-component Schrodinger cat states. Our scheme can prepare cat states of arbitrary size with nearly perfect fidelity. Moreover, we investigate engineering more complex even-parity states such as four-component cat states by iteratively applying our even-parity detector.
We demonstrate that superpositions of coherent and displaced Fock states, also referred to as generalized Schrodinger cats cats, can be created by application of a nonlinear displacement operator which is a deformed version of the Glauber displacement operator. Consequently, such generalized cat states can be formally considered as nonlinear coherent states. We then show that Glauber-Fock photonic lattices endowed with alternating positive and negative coupling coefficients give rise to classical analogs of such cat states. In addition, it is pointed out that the analytic propagator of these deformed Glauber-Fock arrays explicitly contains the Wigner operator opening the possibility to observe Wigner functions of the quantum harmonic oscillator in the classical domain.
Coherent manipulation of an increasing number of qubits for the generation of entangled states has been an important goal and benchmark in the emerging field of quantum information science. The multiparticle entangled states serve as physical resources for measurement-based quantum computing and high-precision quantum metrology. However, their experimental preparation has proved extremely challenging. To date, entangled states up to six, eight atoms, or six photonic qubits have been demonstrated. Here, by exploiting both the photons polarization and momentum degrees of freedom, we report the creation of hyper-entangled six-, eight-, and ten-qubit Schrodinger cat states. We characterize the cat states by evaluating their fidelities and detecting the presence of genuine multi-partite entanglement. Small modifications of the experimental setup will allow the generation of various graph states up to ten qubits. Our method provides a shortcut to expand the effective Hilbert space, opening up interesting applications such as quantum-enhanced super-resolving phase measurement, graph-state generation for anyonic simulation and topological error correction, and novel tests of nonlocality with hyper-entanglement.