Stabilizing arrays of photonic cat states via spontaneous symmetry breaking


Abstract in English

The controlled generation and the protection of entanglement is key to quantum simulation and quantum computation. At the single-mode level, protocols based on photonic cat states hold strong promise as they present unprecedentedly long-lived coherence and may be combined with powerful error correction schemes. Here, we demonstrate that robust ensembles of many-body photonic cat states can be generated in a Bose-Hubbard model with pair hopping via a spontaneous U(1) symmetry breaking mechanism. We identify a parameter region where the ground state is a massively degenerate manifold consisting of local cat states which are factorized throughout the lattice and whose conserved individual parities can be used to make a register of qubits. This phenomenology occurs for arbitrary system sizes or geometries, as soon as long-range order is established, and it extends to driven-dissipative conditions. In the thermodynamic limit, it is related to a Mott insulator to pair-superfluid phase transition.

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