Generation of nonclassical states by superposition of number-conserving operations on squeezed thermal state

Abstract

Abstract The nonclassicality is the prerequisite for quantum states to be applied into quantum information, especially for quantum metrology. Here we theoretically investigate the non-classical properties of the non-Gaussian state generated by repeatedly operating a number-conserving generalized superposition of products (GSP), i.e., (s 1 aa † + t 1 a † a)m with s 1 2 + t 1 2 = 1 , on the squeezed thermal state (STS), in terms of second-order correlation function, Mandel’s Q parameter, quadrature squeezing and Wigner function (WF). It is shown that, compared to the cases of the STS, the GSP-STS with the high-order GSP operations (m > 1) at the small-squeezing levels can be beneficial to the existence of the photon-antibunching effect, the sub-Poissonian distribution and the partial negativity of the WF, apart from the quadrature squeezing. In addition, for the case of m = 1, we also compare with the non-classical properties of several different non-Gaussian resources, involving the photon-subtracted-then-added (PSTA) STS, the GSP-STS and the photon-added-then-subtracted (PATS) STS. It is found that the PSTA-STS with respect to the sub-Poissonian distribution and the partial negativity of the WF has a better performance than others. Significantly, the generated GSP-STS has an obvious advantage of showing the photon-antibunching effects, compared to the PSTA-STS and the PATS-STS, which means that our scheme may have an excellent guidance for the practical implementations in quantum information.