Photon number states generated from a continuous-wave light source

Abstract

Conditional preparation of photon number states from a continuous-wave nondegenerate optical parametric oscillator is investigated. We derive the phase space Wigner function for the output state conditioned on photo detection events that are not necessarily simultaneous, and we maximize its overlap with the desired photon number state by choosing the optimal temporal output state mode function. We present a detailed numerical analysis for the case of two-photon state generation from a parametric oscillator driven with an arbitrary intensity below threshold, and in the low intensity limit, we present a formalism that yields the optimal output state mode function and fidelity for higher photon number states.