Cool for Cats

Abstract

The iconic Schrödinger's cat state describes a system that may be in a superposition of two macroscopically distinct states, for example two clearly separated oscillator coherent states. Quite apart from their role in understanding the quantum classical boundary, such states have been suggested as offering a quantum advantage for quantum metrology, quantum communication and quantum computation. As is well known these applications have to face the difficulty that the irreversible interaction with an environment causes the superposition to rapidly evolve to a mixture of the component states in the case that the environment is not monitored. Here we show that by engineering the interaction with the environment there exists a large class of systems that can evolve irreversibly to a cat state. To be precise we show that it is possible to engineer an irreversible process so that the steady state is close to a pure Schrödinger's cat state by using double well systems and an environment comprising two-photon (or phonon) absorbers. We also show that it should be possible to prolong the lifetime of a Schrödinger's cat state exposed to the destructive effects of a conventional single-photon decohering environment. Our protocol should make it easier to prepare and maintain Schrödinger cat states which would be useful in applications of quantum metrology and information processing as well as being of interest to those probing the quantum to classical transition.

10 pages, 7 figures. Significantly updated version with supplementary information

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Cited by in corpus (17)

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• Generating Large Cats with Nine Lives: Long-Lived Macroscopically Distinct Superposition States in Atomic Ensembles
• Pair-cat codes: autonomous error-correction with low-order nonlinearity
• Exact results for Schrödinger cats in driven-dissipative systems and their feedback control
• Hybrid systems for the generation of non-classical mechanical states via quadratic interactions
• Journeys from Quantum Optics to Quantum Technology
• Hybrid quantum device with a carbon nanotube and a flux qubit for dissipative quantum engineering
• Quantum Systems Engineering: A structured approach to accelerating the development of a quantum technology industry
• Protected cat states from kinetic driving of a boson gas
• All-optical generation of deterministic squeezed Schrödinger-cat states
• Resonant Schrödinger Cat States in Circuit Quantum Electrodynamics
• Optical Schrödinger Cat States in One Mode and two Coupled-Modes Subject to Environments
• Deterministic amplification of Schroedinger cat states in circuit quantum electrodynamics
• Lindbladians with multiple steady states: theory and applications
• Some implications of superconducting quantum interference to the application of master equations in engineering quantum technologies
• Entanglement Dynamics of Quantum Oscillators Nonlinearly Coupled to Thermal Environments
• Beating the 3 dB Limit for Intracavity Squeezing and Its Application to Nondemolition Qubit Readout