According to the fundamental laws of quantum optics, noise is necessarily added to the system when one tries to clone or amplify a quantum state. However, it has recently been shown that the quantum noise related to the operation of a linear phase-insensitive amplifier can be avoided when the requirement of a deterministic operation is relaxed. Nondeterministic noiseless linear amplifiers are therefore realizable. Usually nondeterministic amplifiers rely on using single photon sources. We have, in contrast, recently proposed an amplification scheme in which no external energy is added to the signal, but the energy required to amplify the signal originates from the stochastic fluctuations in the field itself. Applying our amplification scheme, we examine the amplifier gain and the success rate as well as the properties of the output states after successful and failed amplification processes. We also optimize the setup to find the maximum success rates in terms of the reflectivities of the beam splitters used in the setup. In addition, we discuss the nonidealities related to the operation of our setup and the relation of our setup with the previous setups.

Date Published: 6 May 2013
PDF: 10 pages
Proc. SPIE 8773, Photon Counting Applications IV; and Quantum Optics and Quantum Information Transfer and Processing, 877312 (6 May 2013); doi: 10.1117/12.2017363

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 8773:
Photon Counting Applications IV; and Quantum Optics and Quantum Information Transfer and Processing
Jaromír Fiurásek; Ivan Prochazka; Roman Sobolewski, Editor(s)