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Nature

Generation of optical ‘Schrödinger cats’ from photon number states

Alexei Ourjoumtsev, Hyunseok Jeong, Rosa Tualle-Brouri, Philippe Grangier

Published Aug 15, 2007• 720 citations
Publisher
DOI
10.1038/nature06054

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A "Schrödinger cat" state of free-propagating light can be defined as a quantum superposition of well separated coherent states. 1, 2 We demonstrated, theoretically and experimentally, a protocol which allows to generate arbitrarily large squeezed Schrödinger cat states, using a homodyne detection and photon number states as resources. We implemented this protocol experimentally with light pulses containing two photons, producing a squeezed Schrödinger cat state with a negative Wigner function. This state clearly presents several quantum phase-space interference fringes between the "dead" and "alive" components, and it is large enough to become useful for experimental tests of quantum theory and quantum information processing.

Proceedings of SPIE, the International Society for Optical Engineering/Proceedings of SPIE•Sep 9, 2007•0 citations
We report an efficient way to generate both even and odd optical analogs of Schrodinger cat states (SCSs) which are a superposition of two coherent states with opposite amplitudes. The resources consumed are single mode squeezed vacuum (SMSV) state and single photon. SCSs are formed after superimposing the input states with the subsequent detection of the number of photons in the auxiliary mode. We report the generation of even/odd SCSs with amplitude 4.2 with fidelity >0.99 and an acceptable for offline experiments success probability. There is a tendency towards an increase in the size of the SCSs with the fidelity >0.99 more demonstrated with an increase in the number of extracted photons.
We propose to use cavity Rydberg electromagnetically induced transparency to generate Schrödinger cat states of optical photons. We predict that this should make it possible to generate states with relatively large mean photon numbers. With existing technology, mean photon numbers around 30 seem feasible. The main limitation is photon loss during the process, which generates the state. The ability to tune the strength of the photon loss caused by atomic spontaneous emission makes it possible to have little decoherence despite significant photon loss during the generation of the state.
A "Schrödinger cat" state of free-propagating light can be defined as a quantum superposition of well separated coherent states. 1, 2 We demonstrated, theoretically and experimentally, a protocol which allows to generate arbitrarily large squeezed Schrödinger cat states, using a homodyne detection and photon number states as resources. We implemented this protocol experimentally with light pulses containing two photons, producing a squeezed Schrödinger cat state with a negative Wigner function. This state clearly presents several quantum phase-space interference fringes between the "dead" and "alive" components, and it is large enough to become useful for experimental tests of quantum theory and quantum information processing.