Windowed Catodyne Measurements: Continuum Approximation versus Exact Discrete Photon-Number Treatment

Abstract

We analyze a family of measurements obtained by retaining only a finite window of the photon-sum variable in catodyne detection, where a Schrödinger cat state serves as the local oscillator. In the continuum approximation, the window half-width appears to act as a continuous knob for coherence. However, a treatment on the discrete photon-number lattice shows that, in the strong-LO regime, the coherence conditioned on the difference outcome is not suppressed by the window. The exact parity-sensitive success probability is a staircase function of and , whose plateau structure and magnitude the continuum formulas fail to capture, especially for small and narrow windows. For remote preparation of cat states, an exact calculation with a finitely squeezed resource shows that the remote state keeps a purity close to one when x is resolved, and loses purity mainly when x is not recorded. Our results clarify where the continuum approximation of catodyne detection can be trusted and where the discrete photon-number structure must be used.