Amplification of realistic cat-like states by homodyne heralding

TL;DR

This paper proposes a scheme to amplify cat-like quantum states using homodyne heralding, analyzing its effectiveness and scalability with realistic imperfections.

Contribution

It introduces a novel homodyne-based amplification method for cat states and evaluates its performance under practical conditions.

Findings

High fidelity amplification achievable with realistic detection

Success rate depends on input state and detection precision

Scalability demonstrated for multiple amplification steps

Abstract

We present a scheme for the amplification of Schrodinger cats that collapses two smaller states onto their constructive interference via a homodyne projection. We analyze the performance of the amplification in terms of fidelity and success rate when the input consists of either exact coherent state superpositions or of photon-subtracted squeezed vacua. The impact of imprecise homodyne detection and of impure squeezing is quantified. We also assess the scalability of iterated amplifications.