Simultaneous preparation of two optical cat states based on a nondegenerate optical parametric amplifier

Abstract: The optical cat state, known as the superposition of coherent states, has broad applications in quantum computation and quantum metrology. Increasing the number of optical cat states is crucial to implement complex quantum information tasks based on them. Here, we prepare two optical cat states simultaneously based on a nondegenerate optical parametric amplifier. By subtracting one photon from each of two squeezed vacuum states, two odd cat states with orthogonal superposition direction in phase space are prepared simultaneously, which have similar fidelity of 60% and amplitude of 1.2. Compared with the traditional method to generate two odd optical cat states based on two degenerate optical parametric amplifiers, only one nondegenerate optical parametric amplifier is applied in our experiment, which saves half of the quantum resource of nonlinear cavities. The presented results make a step toward preparing the four-component cat state, which has potential applications in fault-tolerant quantum computation.