Quantum Optical State Comparison Amplifier

It is a fundamental principle of quantum theory that an unknown state cannot be copied or, as a consequence, an unknown optical signal cannot be amplified deterministically and perfectly. Here we describe a protocol that provides nondeterministic quantum optical amplification in the coherent state basis with high gain, high fidelity and which does not use quantum resources. The scheme is based on two mature quantum optical technologies, coherent state comparison and photon subtraction. The method compares favourably with all previous nondeterministic amplifiers in terms of fidelity and success probability.