Fock states are a fundamental resource for many quantum technologies such as quantum metrology. While much progress has been made in single-photon source technologies, preparing Fock states with large photon number remains challenging. We present and analyze a bootstrapped approach for non-deterministically preparing large photon-number Fock states by iteratively fusing smaller Fock states on a beamsplitter. We show that by employing state recycling we are able to exponentially improve the preparation rate over conventional schemes, allowing the efficient preparation of large Fock states. The scheme requires single-photon sources, beamsplitters, number-resolved photo-detectors, fast-feedforward, and an optical quantum memory.
@article{arxiv.1603.00533,
title = {Efficient recycling strategies for preparing large Fock states from single-photon sources --- Applications to quantum metrology},
author = {Keith R. Motes and Ryan L. Mann and Jonathan P. Olson and Nicholas M. Studer and E. Annelise Bergeron and Alexei Gilchrist and Jonathan P. Dowling and Dominic W. Berry and Peter P. Rohde},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1603.00533},
year = {2018}
}