Optomechanical non-Gaussian quantum steering and remote preparation of large-size motional Sch\"ordinger cat states

Abstract

In this paper, we present a scheme for remotely generating large-size motional Schr\"{o}dinger cat states in cavity optomechanical (OM) systems with non-Gaussian quantum steering of continuous variables. We consider that the output field from the OM cavity undergoes three typical kinds of multiphoton operations: multiphoton subtraction, multiphoton addition, or multiphoton catalysis, followed by homodyne detection. We first demonstrate that these multiphoton operations can lead to non-Gaussian OM quantum steerable correlations, which are unveiled by the subsequent homodyne detection with a Fisher-information-based steering criterion. It is found that the non-Gaussian steering is obviously enhanced with an increasing number $n$ of photons in the multiphoton operations, which, as we show, fails to be revealed with the well-known Reid's steering criterion. It therefore suggests that the Fisher-information-based criterion is more effective for witnessing non-Gaussian quantum steering. We next show that the strong OM steering enables the remote preparation of large-size Schr\"{o}dinger odd or even cat states of the mechanical oscillator by the homodyne detection. Accordingly, the amplitudes of the cat states also increase significantly with the photon number $n$, particularly in the cases of multiphoton subtraction and addition. Our results reveal the properties of non-Gaussian steering generated by multiphoton operations, and the large cat states of macroscopic mechanical resonators hold promise for fundamental tests in quantum mechanics and practical applications in quantum science.