Principles of optics in Fock space for the scalable manipulation of large quantum states
摘要
The principles of wave optics provide elegant and scalable control over classical light in spatial and temporal domains. However, in the quantum regime, engineering Fock states of photons has been largely restricted to only a few photons at a time, hindered by the computational and experimental challenges of large Hilbert spaces. Here we introduce a conceptual framework of wave propagation in the quantum domain by treating the photon number in a microwave resonator as a synthetic dimension. In the large-photon limit, the coupling between adjacent Fock states becomes approximately uniform, allowing us to establish an analogy to light propagation. Using a superconducting cavity, we experimentally demonstrate Fock-space analogues of optical propagation, refraction, lensing, dispersion and interference with up to 180 photons. By mapping intuitive optical concepts onto the domain of high-dimensional quantum state engineering, our work provides an approach to scalable control of large-scale quantum systems with thousands of photons and advanced bosonic information processing.