Proposal for generating Fock states in traveling wave fields

Abstract

Abstract We describe a proposal for the generation of a single-mode photonic number state, | N 〉 , in a traveling wave optical field. The state is obtained by state reduction from an input coherent state using Kerr media. Our method is based on a previous scheme used for hole burning in the Fock space by minimizing the Mandel Q parameter. The same method was used by Maia et al., but ours is different, it requires only one single photon injected in the entire setup and one photon detection at the end.