Conditional Production of Schroedinger Cat States with Inefficient Photon Detection
Austin P. Lund, Hyunseok Jeong, Timothy C. Ralph, M. S. Kim · CERN Document Server (European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2003
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 ($\\alpha>2$) and high fidelity ($F>0.99$). In contrast to all previous schemes to generate such a state, our scheme does not need photon resolving measurements nor Kerr-type nonlinear interactions.