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Nanosystems Physics Chemistry Mathematics

Discrimination and decoherence of Schrödinger cat states in lossy quantum channels

R. Goncharov, Alexei D. Kiselev, N. G. Veselkova, Ranim Ali, Fedor Dmitrievich Kiselev

Published Dec 31, 2021• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

We investigate environment induced effects of decoherence in discrimination between the Schrödinger cat states transmitted through noisy quantum channels such as optical fibers.We calculate the fidelity and the statistics of photocounts for both even and odd coherent states.The method that uses the beam splitter-like transformation acting in the enlarged Hilbert space to model the quantum channel is compared with the approach based on the Lindblad dynamics of one-mode bosonic systems.

DOI
10.17586/2220-8054-2021-12-6-697-702

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The study of decoherence properties improves our understanding of the fundamental principles of quantum mechanics and advances the study of quantum information processing. Herein, we report a wave-optical experiment that can simulate the decoherence process of a Schrodinger’s cat state (SCS) by photon loss. The method is based on an analogy between image rotation in wave optics and a beam splitter in quantum optics. Experimental results show that the SCS rapidly decays into a statistical mixture of two Gaussian states with approximately 10% photon loss. This behavior can be well described within the framework of quantum optics.
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