Engineering Schr\'odinger cat states with a photonic even-parity detector
| Autor: | Thekkadath, G. S., Bell, B. A., Walmsley, I. A., Lvovsky, A. I. |
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| Rok vydání: | 2019 |
| Předmět: | |
| Zdroj: | Quantum 4, 239 (2020) |
| Druh dokumentu: | Working Paper |
| DOI: | 10.22331/q-2020-03-02-239 |
| Popis: | 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 Schr\"odinger 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. Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures |
| Databáze: | arXiv |
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