arXiv:1603.00533 · Physical Review A
Efficient recycling strategies for preparing large Fock states from single-photon sources: Applications to quantum metrology
Keith R. Motes, Ryan L. Mann, Jonathan P. Olson, Nicholas M. Studer, E. Annelise Bergeron, Alexei Gilchrist, Jonathan P. Dowling, Dominic William Berry, Peter P. Rohde
Abstract
Fock states are a fundamental resource for many quantum technologies such as quantum metrology. While much progress has been made in single-photon source technologies, preparing Fock states with a large photon number remains challenging. We present and analyze a bootstrapped approach for nondeterministically preparing large photon-number Fock states by iteratively fusing smaller Fock states on a beamsplitter. We show that by employing state recycling we are able to exponentially improve the preparation rate over conventional schemes, allowing the efficient preparation of large Fock states. The scheme requires single-photon sources, beamsplitters, number-resolved photodetectors, fast-feedforward, and an optical quantum memory.