Engineering Schrödinger cat states with a photonic even-parity detector
1Clarendon Laboratory, University of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PU, UK
2Russian Quantum Center, 100 Novaya St., Skolkovo, Moscow 143025, Russia
Published: | 2020-03-02, volume 4, page 239 |
Eprint: | arXiv:1908.10314v3 |
Doi: | https://doi.org/10.22331/q-2020-03-02-239 |
Citation: | Quantum 4, 239 (2020). |
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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 Schrödinger 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.

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