Preparation of Large Fock States in Resonators with High Probability

Abstract

Large Fock states are important resources for bosonic quantum information and quantum-enhanced metrology, but preparing them with high probability at large excitation numbers remains challenging, as deterministic methods become increasingly control-intensive, while measurement-based approaches typically suffer from low heralding probabilities. Here we propose a protocol that combines quantum nondemolition photon-number encoding with quantum amplitude amplification to enable high-probability heralded generation of large Fock states. Starting from a cavity mode prepared in a coherent state, Quantum Phase Estimation encodes photon-number information into a multi-qubit register, while Quantum Amplitude Amplification boosts the probability of a desired target outcome before measurement. The scheme has an immediate implementation in dispersive circuit-QED, but can be analogously adapted to other bosonic platforms with QND photon-number readout, such as cavity-QED. With a register of up to eight qubits, near-deterministic preparation of Fock states with hundreds of excitations is possible. We also show that the protocol can serve as the first stage of an extension toward generating a two-mode NOON state via a conditional beam-splitter operation.