Nonclassical fields and the nonlinear interferometer
Barry Cyril Sanders, Dien A. Rice · Physical Review A · 1999
We demonstrate several results for the nonlinear interferometer, that emerge from a formalism which elegantly describes the output field of the nonlinear interferometer as two-mode entangled coherent states. We clarify the relationship between squeezing and entangled coherent states, since a weak nonlinear evolution produces a squeezed output, while a strong nonlinear evolution produces a two-mode, two-state entangled coherent state. In between these two extremes exist superpositions of two-mode coherent states manifesting varying degrees of entanglement for arbitrary values of the nonlinearity. The cardinality of the basis set of the entangled coherent states is finite when the ratio \ensuremath{\chi}/\ensuremath{\pi} is rational, where \ensuremath{\chi} is the nonlinear strength. We also show that entangled coherent states can be produced from product coherent states via a nonlinear medium without the need for the interferometric configuration. This provides an important experimental simplification in the process of creating entangled coherent states.