Towards effective shaping of large-amplitude high-fidelity Schrodinger cat states by inefficient photon number resolving detection

Abstract: We propose an efficient way to generate optical analogs of both even and odd Schrodinger cat states (SCSs) with high fidelity, large amplitude and reasonable generation rate. The resource consumed are a single-mode squeezed vacuum state (SMSV) and possibly a single photon or nothing. We report the generation of even (odd) SCS with amplitude 4.2, fidelity higher than 0.99 and reasonable generation rate by subtraction of 30(31) photons from SMSV by ideal photon number detection. In the case of inefficient detectors, maintaining SCS size and its fidelity at the same level as in the case of ideal detectors results in a dramatic decrease in the success probability. In order to have certain harmony between the three characteristics (large amplitude, high fidelity and acceptable success probability for the generation scheme) in the case of imperfect detection, highly transmitting beam splitters should not be used and number of the subtracted photons must be reduced to 10(11).