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Physical Review A

Generation of the Schrödinger-cat state by continuous photodetection

Tetsuo Ogawa, Masahito Ueda, Nobuyuki Imoto

Published Jun 1, 1991• 53 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Nonunitary time evolution of an initially highly squeezed state under continuous photon-number measurement is investigated using the quasiprobability distribution. It is found that the measured quantum state bifurcates into two macroscopically distinguishable states upon the detection of a single photon, while preserving purity by feeding back real-time readout information.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.43.6458

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Physical Review Letters•Feb 25, 1991•32 citations
Nonunitary time evolution of an initially highly squeezed state under continuous photon-number measurement is investigated using the quasiprobability distribution. It is found that the measured quantum state bifurcates into two macroscopically distinguishable states upon the detection of a single photon, while preserving purity by feeding back real-time readout information.
This paper presents a general theory for a continuous quantum-nondemolition measurement of photon number. This theory treats a time-distributed measurement as a sequence of measurements in which at most one photon can be detected in an infinitesimal time, and shows that the average number of photons remaining in the measured field increases when a photon is detected and decreases when no photon is detected. The state of the measured system evolves nonunitarily and reduces continuously to a nunber state whose eigenvalue is uniquely determined by the average rate of photodetection and whose probability distribution coincides with the initial photon-number distribution. Applying the general theory to typical quantum states---coherent, thermal, and squeezed states---shows that the continuous-state reduction towards a number state depends strongly on the initial photon statistics. Despite the nonunitarity of state evolution, an initially pure state keeps its purity: the initial density operator becomes diagonalized only if the readout information is discarded.
We develop a quantum theory for continuous photodetection processes that describes nonunitary time development of the field under continuous measurement of photon number. Exact expressions are obtained for time evolutions of the photon-field density operator, average and variance of the photon number, and the Fano factor. These are applied to typical quantum states, i.e., number, coherent, thermal, and squeezed states. The continuous photodetection process is made up of two elementary processes in terms of the referring measurement process, that is, one-count and no-count processes. Just after the one-count process in which a photodetector registers one photoelectron, the average photon number 〈n(t)〉 of the remaining field is shown to increase for super-Poissonian states (e.g., thermal state) and decrease for sub-Poissonian states (e.g., number state); for the Poissonian state (e.g., coherent light), 〈n(t)〉 does not change. During the no-count process in which the photodetector registers no photoelectrons, on the other hand, 〈n(t)〉 decreases in time for all states except the number state. The physical origins for these results are clarified from the viewpoint of nonunitary state reduction by continuous measurement of photon number. Furthermore, we introduce a nonreferring measurement process in which the detector registers photocounts, but we discard all readout information. We discuss the difference in the way the photon field evolves in this process compared to the referring measurement process.
We have generated and measured an approximation of an optical Schrödinger cat state by photon subtraction from a squeezed state. Using single-photon avalanche photodiode detectors and photon-number-resolving transition edge sensors, we were able to extract Wigner distributions for one or two photons subtracted from the squeezed state, resulting in both an odd and even cat state. The one-photon-subtracted Wigner distribution shows measured negative features (without any correction), indicating quantum character. The Wigner distribution of the two-photon-subtracted state is negative after correcting for homodyne losses. A full statistical analysis is under way to quantify the magnitude and fidelity of the cat states generated.
Until now, Schrödinger's cat states are generated by subtracting single photons from the whole bandwidth of squeezed vacua. However, it was pointed out recently that the achievable purities are limited in such method (J. Yoshikawa, W. Asavanant, and A. Furusawa, arXiv:1707.08146 [quant-ph] (2017)). In this paper, we used our new photon subtraction method with a narrowband filtering cavity and generated a highly pure Schrödinger's cat state with the value of −0.184-0.184−0.184 at the origin of the Wigner function. To our knowledge, this is the highest value ever reported without any loss corrections. The temporal mode also becomes exponentially rising in our method, which allows us to make a real-time quadrature measurement on Schrödinger's cat states, and we obtained the value of −0.162-0.162−0.162 at the origin of the Wigner function.
It is shown that a linear superposition of two macroscopically distinguishable optical coherent states (Schroedinger's cat state) can be generated using a single photon source and simple all-optical operations. Weak squeezing on a single photon, beam mixing with an auxiliary coherent state, and photon detecting with imperfect threshold detectors are enough to generate a free propagating optical cat state with a large coherent amplitude (alpha>2\\alpha>2alpha>2) and high fidelity (F>0.99F>0.99F>0.99). In contrast to all previous schemes to generate such a state, our scheme does not need photon resolving measurements nor Kerr-type nonlinear interactions.