Abstract
A scheme for generating Schrödinger-cat-like states of a single-mode optical field by means of conditional measurement is proposed. Feeding a squeezed vacuum into a beam splitter 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.
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevA.55.3184
©1997 American Physical Society