Skip to content

Schroedinger cat-like states by conditional measurements on a beam-splitter

M. Dakna, T. Anhut, T. Opartny, L. Knoll, D. -G. Welsch

quant-pharXiv:quant-ph/9612011

Abstract

A scheme for generating Schrödinger cat-like states of a single-mode optical field by means of conditional measurement is proposed. Feeding into a beam splitter a squeezed vacuum and counting the photons in one of the output channels, the conditional states in the other output channel exhibit a number of properties that are very similar to those of superpositions of two coherent states with opposite phases. We present analytical and numerical results for the photon-number and quadrature-component distributions of the conditional states and their Wigner and Husimi functions. Further, we discuss the effect of realistic photocounting on the states.

Create a lesson