Generation of Schrödinger cat states through photon-assisted Landau-Zener-Stückelberg interferometry

Schrödinger cat states are useful for many applications, ranging from quantum information processing to high-precision measurements. In this paper we propose a conceptually new method for creating such cat states, based on photon-assisted Landau-Zener-Stückelberg interferometry in a hybrid system consisting of a qubit coupled to a photon cavity. We show that by initializing the qubit in one of its basis states, performing three consecutive sweeps of the qubit energy splitting across the 1-photon resonance, and finally projecting the qubit to the same basis state, the parity of the photon field can be purified to very high degree; when the initial photon state is a coherent state, the final state will then be very close to a Schrödinger cat state. We present numerical simulations that confirm that our protocol could work with high fidelity $sim 0.99$ for coherent states of reasonable size $|α|² sim 10$. Furthermore, we suggest that our protocol can also be used to transfer quantum information between the qubit and a superposition of orthogonal cat states in the cavity.