Amplification of realistic cat-like states by homodyne heralding

Abstract

We present a scheme for the amplification of Schrodinger cats that collapses two smaller states onto their constructive interference via a homodyne projection. We analyze the performance of the amplification in terms of fidelity and success rate when the input consists of either exact coherent state superpositions or of photon-subtracted squeezed vacua. The impact of imprecise homodyne detection and of impure squeezing is quantified. We also assess the scalability of iterated amplifications.