Unveiling and veiling a Schr\"odinger cat state from the vacuum
Abstract
Deep in the ultrastrong light-matter coupling regime, it has been predicted that the ground state of a two-level atom interacting with a cavity mode takes the form of a "virtual" Schr\"odinger cat entangled state between light and matter. We propose a method to convert this Schr\"odinger cat state from virtual to real, and back again, by driving the atom with optimally chosen pulses. Our system consists of a four-level atom, with two of these levels ultrastrongly coupled to a cavity mode. We show that the Schr\"odinger cat state can be converted between virtual and real by making use of either an ideal ultrafast pulse or a multi-tone {\pi}-pulse. In addition to allowing us to observe these unusual virtual states this method could also be used to generate entangled cat states on demand for quantum information processing.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2110.02674,
title = {Unveiling and veiling a Schr\"odinger cat state from the vacuum},
author = {Roberto Stassi and Mauro Cirio and Ken Funo and Neill Lambert and Jorge Puebla and Franco Nori},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.02674},
year = {2021}
}