Engineering Schrodinger cat states with a photonic even parity detector

Journal article

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.

Files:: 1908.10314v3.pdf

(Preview, Accepted manuscript, 2.7MB, Terms of use)

Publisher:: Verein zur Förderung des Open Access Publizierens in den Quantenwissenschaften
Journal:: Quantum More from this journal
Volume:: 4
Issue:: 239
Publication date:: 2020-03-02
Acceptance date:: 2020-02-24
DOI:: 10.22331/q-2020-03-02-239
ISSN:: 2521-327X

Copyright holder:: Thekkadath et al.
Rights statement:: © 2020 The authors. This Paper is published in Quantum under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. Copyright remains with the original copyright holders such as the authors or their institutions.

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