Converting Quasiclassical States into Arbitrary Fock State Superpositions in a Superconducting Circuit

We propose and experimentally demonstrate a new method to generate arbitrary Fock state superpositions in a superconducting quantum circuit, where a qubit is dispersively coupled to a microwave cavity mode. Here, the qubit is used to conditionally modulate the probability amplitudes of the Fock state components of a coherent state to those of the desired superposition state, instead of pumping photons one by one into the cavity as in previous schemes. Our method does not require the adjustment of the qubit frequency during the cavity state preparation and is more robust to noise and accumulation of experimental errors compared to previous ones. Using the method, we experimentally generate phase eigenstates under various Hilbert-space dimensions and squeezed states, which are useful for the quantum walk and high-precision measurement.