A scheme for generating Schr\"{o}dinger cat-like states of a single-mode optical field by means of conditional measurement is proposed. Feeding into a beam splitter a squeezed vacuum and counting the photons in one of the output channels, the conditional states in the other output channel exhibit a number of properties that are very similar to those of superpositions of two coherent states with opposite phases. We present analytical and numerical results for the photon-number and quadrature-component distributions of the conditional states and their Wigner and Husimi functions. Further, we discuss the effect of realistic photocounting on the states.
@article{arxiv.quant-ph/9612011,
title = {Schroedinger cat-like states by conditional measurements on a beam-splitter},
author = {M. Dakna and T. Anhut and T. Opartny and L. Knoll and D. -G. Welsch},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:quant-ph/9612011},
year = {2009}
}