Deterministic generation of N00N states using quantum dots in a cavity

Abstract

Compared to classical light sources, quantum sources based on N00N states consisting of $N$ photons achieve an $N$-times higher phase sensitivity, giving rise to super-resolution. N00N-state creation schemes based on linear optics and projective measurements only have a success probability $p$ that decreases exponentially with $N$, e.g. $p=4.4\times 10^{-14}$ for N=20. Feed-forward improves the scaling but $N$ fluctuates nondeterministically in each attempt. Schemes based on parametric down-conversion suffer from low production efficiency and low fidelity. A recent scheme based on atoms in a cavity combines deterministic time evolution, local unitary operations, and projective measurements. Here we propose a novel scheme based on the off-resonant interaction of $N$ photons with four semiconductor quantum dots (QDs) in a cavity to create N00N states deterministically with $p=1$ and fidelity above 90% for $N\lesssim 60$, without the need of any projective measurement or local unitary operation. Using our measure we obtain maximum $N$-photon entanglement $E_N=1$ for arbitrary $N$. Our method paves the way to the miniaturization of N00N-state sources to the nanoscale regime, with the possibility to integrate them on a computer chip based on semiconductor materials.