Fast Cat State Generation Using a Kerr Parametric Oscillator

The cat code have been considered as a promising encoding scheme for practical bosonic quantum computation.

Among various platforms that can create cat states, a Kerr Parametric Oscillator (KPO) has received much attention recently because cat states on this system are easy to create and have much potential for various applications, such as quantum error correction.

One of the complications in the KPO-based cat code is that a two-photon pump must be applied adiabatically to create a cat state, while fast state preparation is desired for efficient quantum computation.

We show that this conflict between speed and adiabaticity can be resolved by controlling the detuning and amplitude of the two-photon pump simultaneously.

Here, we present our experimental results of the fast cat state generation, including Wigner tomography of the KPO state.

We also compare various numerical techniques for cat state generation in term of speed limit and robustness to experimental error.