Conditional Production of Superpositions of Coherent States with Inefficient Photon Detection
Abstract
It is shown that a linear superposition of two macroscopically distinguishable optical coherent states 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 coherent state superposition in a free propagating optical field with a large coherent amplitude () and high fidelity (). In contrast to all previous schemes to generate such a state, our scheme does not need photon number resolving measurements nor Kerr-type nonlinear interactions. Furthermore, it is robust to detection inefficiency and exhibits some resilience to photon production inefficiency.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.quant-ph/0401001,
title = {Conditional Production of Superpositions of Coherent States with Inefficient Photon Detection},
author = {A. P. Lund and H. Jeong and T. C. Ralph and M. S. Kim},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:quant-ph/0401001},
year = {2009}
}
Comments
Some important new results added, to appear in Phys.Rev.A (Rapid Communication)