Amplification of optical Schrödinger cat states with implementation protocol based on frequency comb

Abstract

We proposed and analyzed a scheme to generate large-size Schrödinger cat states based on linear operations of Fock states and squeezed vacuum states and conditional measurements. By conducting conditional measurements via photon number detectors, two unbalanced Schrödinger kitten states combined by a beam splitter can be amplified to a large-size cat state with the same parity. According to simulation results, two Schrödinger odd kitten states of $\beta =1.06$ and $\beta =1.11$ generated from one-photon-subtracted squeezed vacuum states of $-$3 dB, are amplified to an odd cat state of $\beta =1.73$ with a fidelity of $F=99\%$. A large-size Schrödinger odd cat state with $\beta =2.51$ and $F=97.30\%$ is predicted when the input squeezed vacuum states are increased to $-$5.91 dB. According to the analysis on the impacts of experimental imperfections in practice, Schrödinger odd cat states of $\beta >2$ are available. A feasible configuration based on a quantum frequency comb is developed to realize the large-size cat state generation scheme we proposed.

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