Deterministic protocol for mapping a qubit to coherent state superpositions in a cavity

Abstract

We introduce a new gate that transfers an arbitrary state of a qubit into a superposition of two quasi-orthogonal coherent states of a cavity mode, with opposite phases. This qcMAP gate is based on conditional qubit and cavity operations exploiting the energy level dispersive shifts, in the regime where they are much stronger than the cavity and qubit linewidths. The generation of multi-component superpositions of quasi-orthogonal coherent states, non-local entangled states of two resonators and multi-qubit GHZ states can be efficiently achieved by this gate.