All-optical generation of deterministic squeezed Schrödinger-cat states

Quantum states are important resources and their preparations are essential prerequisites to all quantum technologies. However, they are extremely fragile due to the inevitable dissipations. Here the all-optical generation of a deterministic squeezed Schr\"odinger-cat state based on dissipation is proposed. Our system is based on the Fredkin-type interaction between three optical modes, one of which is subject to coherent two-photon driving and the others are coherent driving. We show that an effective degenerate three-wave-mixing process can be engineered in our system, which can cause the simultaneous loss of two photons, resulting in the generation of a deterministic squeezed Schr\"odinger-cat state. More importantly, by controlling the driving fields in our system, the two-photon loss can be adjustable, which can accelerate the generation of squeezed Schr\"odinger-cat states. In addition, we exploit the squeezed Schr\"odinger-cat states to estimate the phase in the optical interferometer and show that the quantum Fisher information about the phase can reach the Heisenberg limit in the limit of a large photon number. Meanwhile, it can have an order of magnitude factor improvement over the Heisenberg limit in the low-photon-number regime, which is very valuable for fragile systems that cannot withstand large photon fluxes. This work proposes an all-optical scheme to deterministically prepare the squeezed Schr\"odinger-cat state with high speed and can also be generalized to other physical platforms.