Large Fock states are important resources for bosonic quantum information and quantum-enhanced metrology, but preparing them with high probability at large excitation numbers remains challenging, as deterministic methods become increasingly control-intensive, while measurement-based approaches typically suffer from low heralding probabilities. Here we propose a protocol that combines quantum nondemolition photon-number encoding with quantum amplitude amplification to enable high-probability heralded generation of large Fock states. Starting from a cavity mode prepared in a coherent state, Quantum Phase Estimation encodes photon-number information into a multi-qubit register, while Quantum Amplitude Amplification boosts the probability of a desired target outcome before measurement. The scheme has an immediate implementation in dispersive circuit-QED, but can be analogously adapted to other bosonic platforms with QND photon-number readout, such as cavity-QED. With a register of up to eight qubits, near-deterministic preparation of Fock states with hundreds of excitations is possible. We also show that the protocol can serve as the first stage of an extension toward generating a two-mode NOON state via a conditional beam-splitter operation.
Large Fock states are important resources for bosonic quantum information and quantum-enhanced metrology, but preparing them with high probability at large excitation numbers remains challenging, as deterministic methods become increasingly control-intensive, while measurement-based approaches typically suffer from low heralding probabilities. Here we propose a protocol that combines quantum nondemolition photon-number encoding with quantum amplitude amplification to enable high-probability heralded generation of large Fock states. Starting from a cavity mode prepared in a coherent state, Quantum Phase Estimation encodes photon-number information into a multi-qubit register, while Quantum Amplitude Amplification boosts the probability of a desired target outcome before measurement. The scheme has an immediate implementation in dispersive circuit-QED, but can be analogously adapted to other bosonic platforms with QND photon-number readout, such as cavity-QED. With a register of up to eight qubits, near-deterministic preparation of Fock states with hundreds of excitations is possible. We also show that the protocol can serve as the first stage of an extension toward generating a two-mode NOON state via a conditional beam-splitter operation.
In this work, we develop a coherent control technique for cavity QED based on amplitude amplification. We consider two physical platforms. In the first setting, we study a three-level quantum emitter coupled to a single mode of an optical cavity and introduce a protocol for producing traveling single photons based on oblivious amplitude amplification. As the key ingredient of our protocol, we propose an extension of oblivious amplitude amplification which uses reflection unitaries solely on the signal qubit, along with U and U†, where the unitary U prepares the initial state. Our approach improves the scaling of the single-photon-generation protocol length from N∼1/p to N∼1/p, with p denoting the success probability of obtaining a short single photon from a single application of the weak control pulse. Furthermore, our protocol also reduces the error from intrinsic cavity loss compared to protocols using a single strong control pulse in various experimentally relevant regimes, suggesting the application of our methods for error reduction. In the second setting, we consider a superconducting qubit coupled to a single bosonic mode of a microwave cavity in a circuit QED architecture in the dispersive regime for preparing Fock states. Using fixed-point amplitude amplification, we obtain a protocol for preparing Fock states whose length scales as O(n1/4), where n is the number of photons. Additionally, as an application of our methods for state preparation, we describe a protocol for preparing NOON states.
The scalable preparation of large photon-number (Fock) states is a long-standing frontier in quantum science, with direct implications for quantum metrology and bosonic quantum information processing. Despite substantial progress at small photon numbers, extending state generation to large photon numbers while maintaining high fidelity and operating deterministically remains a significant challenge. Here we demonstrate a scalable and experimentally accessible control protocol for generating large photon-number states using only native spin--oscillator operations. The protocol alternates Jaynes--Cummings interactions with phase-space displacements to imprint photon-number--dependent phases and convert them into selective interference in photon-number space. It already achieves high preparation fidelity unconditionally, while an optional final qubit projection removes residual qubit--field correlations and further enhances the fidelity. Conditioned on this final projection, photon-number state preparation with fidelities exceeding 0.95 is achieved for photon numbers in the few-hundred regime, with a success probability exceeding 0.90, placing the protocol in a near-deterministic operating regime. The resulting control sequences remain shallow and are robust against detuning, control noise, and experimentally relevant dissipation. Our results establish a practical route to scalable, high-fidelity photon-number state preparation at large photon numbers and provide a versatile interference-engineering toolbox for nonclassical bosonic state synthesis.
Nonclassical states of bosonic modes, especially the large number states, are valuable resources for quantum information processing and quantum metrology. It is however intricate to generate a desired Fock state of bosonic systems by unitary protocols due to their uniform energy spectrum. We here propose a nonunitary protocol that is based on the resonant Jaynes-Cummings interaction of the bosonic mode with an ancillary two-level atom and sequential projective measurements on the atom. Using the generalized parity-measurement operator constructed by several rounds of free evolution with stepwise halved intervals and measurement, we can efficiently filter out the unwanted population and push the target resonator conditionally toward the desired Fock state. In the ideal situation, a Fock state ∣nt≈2000⟩ can be prepared with a fidelity over 98% using only eight rounds of measurements. Under qubit dissipation and dephasing and cavity decay in the current circuit-QED platforms, a Fock state ∣nt≈100⟩ can be prepared with a fidelity of about 80% by six measurements. It is found that the number of measurement rounds for preparing a large Fock state ∣nt⟩ scales roughly as log2nt, which is similar to the number of ancillary qubits required in the state preparation via the quantum phase estimation algorithm and yet costs much less in gate operations. Our protocol can also be used to prepare a large Dicke state ∣J≃1000,0⟩ of a spin ensemble with a sufficiently high fidelity by less than six measurements. It is qualified by the quantum Fisher information approaching the Heisenberg scaling in sensing the rotation phase along the x axis.
Exact Fock-State Preparation with n1/4 Circuit Depth
Efficient, deterministic, and high-fidelity preparation of large Fock states is essential for scaling bosonic quantum technologies and exploring quantum phenomena at large excitation energies. We introduce a deterministic one-parameter (D1p) protocol that maps Fock-state preparation in an infinite-dimensional Hilbert space onto two-dimensional amplitude amplification. Starting from a coherent state with ∣α∣≃n, the initial target-state population scales as n−1/2, yielding an iteration count and circuit depth of O(n1/4). Phase matching guarantees unit fidelity in the ideal model; remarkably, preparing ∣106⟩ requires only 39 iterations. The protocol uses only displacements and number-selective phase operations, requires no numerical optimization, and further extends to state transfer, general superpositions, finite-dimensional systems, and multipartite entangled states. In the large-amplitude regime, its multi-target form prepares L-legged cat states with an iteration count determined only by L; cats with up to ten legs require only two iterations, independent of the coherent-state amplitude. This framework provides a broadly applicable route to highly excited bosonic states on platforms supporting these elementary controls.
Fock states are fundamental quantum states with a precisely defined integer number of excitations, serving as the core basis for describing bosonic modes. Large Fock states provide irreplaceable non-classical resources for quantum information processing and quantum metrology. The deterministic generation of macroscopic photon-number Fock states has long been a difficult problem in the field of quantum optics. We propose an adaptive generalized parity measurement (GPM) protocol for generating Fock states with more than 10000 excitations, avoiding low success probability subject to postselection and high cost under complex coherent controls. For general discrete-spectrum systems, e.g., a bosonic mode coupled to an ancillary qubit, we derive a construction rule in which the intervals between repeated measurements on qubit are updated adaptively based on the last outcome. It means that our protocol does not discard any measurement trajectory, dramatically different from the probabilistic protocols that retain only one prescribed trajectory of postselection. In the resonant Jaynes-Cummings model, a large coherent state can be almost deterministically transformed to a large Fock state of nt=O(104) excitations by 10 rounds of measurements, the average fidelity of which is about 87%. The success probability for obtaining ∣20000−20000≤nt≤20000+20000⟩ with a fidelity above 99% is about 35% with respect to the ensemble sampling. Our protocol is fault-tolerant in the presence of moderate measurement error and parametric imperfection. Also it remains effective when the system is prepared as displaced thermal states, showing reliable performance regardless of initial state.
The Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill encoding has emerged as a leading candidate for fault-tolerant quantum computation with continuous variables. For photonic architectures, the major challenge is preparing high-quality resource states, which can be deterministically synthesised from many large-amplitude cat states. Thus far, only modest-sized optical cat states have been prepared experimentally, and the implemented methods are highly probabilistic. We propose an all-optical scheme utilising quantum non-demolition interactions and photon-number measurements to prepare large-amplitude cat states with near-unity probability. Importantly, no particular photon-number outcome is postselected: all outcomes contribute to the accumulated photon number, with the protocol repeated until a required threshold is reached. We demonstrate that the scheme is robust to realistic levels of photon-loss, the dominant source of error in optical systems. Our results highlight the power of active Gaussian operations for state preparation and pave the way for efficient quantum error correction using bosonic codes.