Production of optical Schrodinger cat states and quantum information processing
- Dr. Hyunseok Jeong (University of Queensland)
May 18, 2004 (Tuesday) 16:00 ~ 17:00: Rm 7323

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 and high fidelity. 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. It is discussed how optical cat states can be used for various applications to quantum information processing.