Generation of highly pure Schrödinger’s cat states and real-time quadrature measurements via optical filtering

Abstract

Until now, Schr\"odinger's cat states are generated by subtracting single photons from the whole bandwidth of squeezed vacua. However, it was pointed out recently that the achievable purities are limited in such method (J. Yoshikawa, W. Asavanant, and A. Furusawa, arXiv:1707.08146 [quant-ph] (2017)). In this paper, we used our new photon subtraction method with a narrowband filtering cavity and generated a highly pure Schr\"odinger's cat state with the value of $-0.184$ at the origin of the Wigner function. To our knowledge, this is the highest value ever reported without any loss corrections. The temporal mode also becomes exponentially rising in our method, which allows us to make a real-time quadrature measurement on Schr\"odinger's cat states, and we obtained the value of $-0.162$ at the origin of the Wigner function.