No Arabic abstract
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 propose a postselecting parity-swap amplifier for Schrodinger cat states that does not require the amplified state to be known a priori. The device is based on a previously-implemented state comparison amplifier for coherent states. It consumes only Gaussian resource states, which provides an advantage over some cat state amplifiers. It requires simple Geiger-mode photodetectors and works with high fidelity and approximately twofold gain.
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.
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.
In the late 80s, Ou and Mandel experimentally observed signal beatings by performing a non-time resolved coincidence detection of two photons having interfered in a balanced beam splitter [Phys. Rev. Lett 61, 54 (1988)]. In this work, we provide a new interpretation of the fringe pattern observed in this experiment as the direct measurement of the chronocyclic Wigner distribution of a frequency Schrodinger cat-like state produced by local spectral filtering. Based on this analysis, we also study time-resolved HOM experiment to measure such frequency state.
In continuous-variable quantum information, non-Gaussian entangled states that are obtained from Gaussian entangled states via photon subtraction are known to contain more entanglement. This makes them better resources for quantum information processing protocols, such as, quantum teleportation. We discuss the teleportation of non-Gaussian, non-classical Schrodinger-cat states of light using two-mode squeezed vacuum light that is made non-Gaussian via subtraction of a photon from each of the two modes. We consider the experimentally realizable cat states produced by subtracting a photon from the single-mode squeezed vacuum state. We discuss two figures of merit for the teleportation process, a) the fidelity, and b) the maximum negativity of the Wigner function at the output. We elucidate how the non-Gaussian entangled resource lowers the requirements on the amount of squeezing necessary to achieve any given fidelity of teleportation, or to achieve negative values of the Wigner function at the output.