Generation of a Cat State in an Optical Sideband

Takahiro Serikawa, Jun-ichi Yoshikawa, Shuntaro Takeda, Hidehiro Yonezawa, Timothy C. Ralph, Elanor H. Huntington, and Akira Furusawa

Phys. Rev. Lett. 121, 143602 – Published 4 October 2018

Abstract

We propose a method to subtract a photon from a double sideband mode of continuous-wave light. The central idea is to use phase modulation as a frequency sideband beam splitter in the heralding photon subtraction scheme, where a small portion of the sideband mode is down-converted to 0 Hz to provide a trigger photon. An optical cat state is created by applying the proposed method to a squeezed state at 500 MHz sideband, which is generated by an optical parametric oscillator. The Wigner function of the cat state reconstructed from a direct homodyne measurement of the 500 MHz sideband modes shows the negativity of $W (0, 0) = - 0.088 \pm 0.001$ without any loss corrections.

Received 9 July 2018

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.143602

Physics Subject Headings (PhySH)

Optical parametric oscillators & amplifiers Quantum state engineering Quantum states of light Squeezing of quantum noise

Atomic, Molecular & Optical

Authors & Affiliations

Takahiro Serikawa¹, Jun-ichi Yoshikawa¹, Shuntaro Takeda¹, Hidehiro Yonezawa^2,3, Timothy C. Ralph^3,4, Elanor H. Huntington^3,5, and Akira Furusawa^1,*

¹Department of Applied Physics, School of Engineering, The University of Tokyo, 7-3-1 Hongo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo, Japan
²School of Engineering and Information Technology, The University of New South Wales, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 2600, Australia
³Center for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology, Australian Research Council, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 2609, Australia
⁴School of Mathematics and Physics, University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland 4072, Australia
⁵Research School of Engineering, College of Engineering and Computer Science, Australian National University, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 2600, Australia