2004/01/31 by A. P. Lund, H. Jeong, T. C. Ralph +1 · 2 citations
Physics and Astronomy · #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreva.70.020101
published as Phys. Rev. A 70, 020101(R) (2004) · Some important new results added, to appear in Phys.Rev.A (Rapid Communication)
arxiv created 2004/07/02 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
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 (α>2) and high fidelity (F>0.99). 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.