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Even though heralded single-photon sources have been generated routinely through the spontaneous parametric down conversion, vacuum and multiple photon states are unavoidably involved. With machine-learning, we report the experimental implementation of single-photon quantum state tomography by directly estimating target parameters. Compared to the Hanbury Brown and Twiss (HBT) measurements only with clicked events recorded, our neural network enhanced quantum state tomography characterizes the photon number distribution for all possible photon number states from the balanced homodyne detectors. By using the histogram-based architecture, a direct parameter estimation on the negativity in Wigner's quasi-probability phase space is demonstrated. Such a fast, robust, and precise quantum state tomography provides us a crucial diagnostic toolbox for the applications with single-photon Fock states and other non-Gaussisan quantum states., Comment: 8 pages, 8 figures

Optical "Schr\"odinger cat" states, the non-classical superposition of two quasi-classical coherent states, serve as a basis for gedanken experiments testing quantum physics on mesoscopic scales and are increasingly recognized as a resource for quantum information processing. Here, we report the first experimental realization of optical "Schr\"odinger cats" by adding a photon to a squeezed vacuum state, so far only photon-subtraction protocols have been realized. Photon-addition gives us the advantage of using heralded signal photons as experimental triggers, and we can generate "Schr\"odinger cats" at rates exceeding $8.5 \times 10^4$ counts per second; at least one order of magnitude higher than all previously reported realizations. Wigner distributions with pronounced negative parts are demonstrated at down to -8.89 dB squeezing, even when the initial squeezed vacuum input state has low purity. Benchmarking against such a degraded squeezed input state we report a maximum fidelity of more than 80% with a maximum cat amplitude of $|\alpha| \approx 1.66$. Our experiment uses photon-addition from pairs, one of those photons is used for monitoring, giving us enhanced control; moreover the pair production rates are high and should allow for repeated application of photon-addition via repeat-stages., Comment: 5 pages, 2 figures, 1 table

With the capability to find the best fit to arbitrarily complicated data patterns, machine-learning (ML) enhanced quantum state tomography (QST) has demonstrated its advantages in extracting complete information about the quantum states. Instead of using the reconstruction model in training a truncated density matrix, we develop a high-performance, lightweight, and easy-to-install supervised characteristic model by generating the target parameters directly. Such a characteristic model-based ML-QST can avoid the problem of dealing with large Hilbert space, but keep feature extractions with high precision. With the experimentally measured data generated from the balanced homodyne detectors, we compare the degradation information about quantum noise squeezed states predicted by the reconstruction and characteristic models, both give agreement to the empirically fitting curves obtained from the covariance method. Such a ML-QST with direct parameter estimations illustrates a crucial diagnostic toolbox for applications with squeezed states, including advanced gravitational wave detectors, quantum metrology, macroscopic quantum state generation, and quantum information process., Comment: 3 figures

We experimentally reconstruct Wigner's current of quantum phase space dynamics for the first time. We reveal the ``push-and-pull" associated with damping and diffusion due to the coupling of a squeezed vacuum state to its environment. In contrast to classical dynamics, where (at zero temperature) dissipation only ``pulls" the system toward the origin of phase space, we also observe an outward ``push" because our system has to obey Heisenberg's uncertainty relations. With squeezed vacuum states generated by an optical parametric oscillator at variable pumping levels, we identify the pure squeezing dynamics and its central stagnation point with a topological charge of `$-1$'. We experimentally verify that this charge is protected for weakly as well as strongly decohering conditions. This work demonstrates high resolving power and establishes an experimental paradigm for measuring quantumness and non-classicality of the dynamics of open quantum systems., Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures

In order to leverage the full power of quantum noise squeezing with unavoidable decoherence, a complete understanding of the degradation in the purity of squeezed light is demanded. By implementing machine learning architecture with a convolutional neural network, we illustrate a fast, robust, and precise quantum state tomography for continuous variables, through the experimentally measured data generated from the balanced homodyne detectors. Compared with the maximum likelihood estimation method, which suffers from time-consuming and over-fitting problems, a well-trained machine fed with squeezed vacuum and squeezed thermal states can complete the task of reconstruction of the density matrix in less than one second. Moreover, the resulting fidelity remains as high as $0.99$ even when the anti-squeezing level is higher than $20$~dB. Compared with the phase noise and loss mechanisms coupled from the environment and surrounding vacuum, experimentally, the degradation information is unveiled with machine learning for low and high noisy scenarios, i.e., with the anti-squeezing levels at $12$~dB and $18$~dB, respectively. Our neural network enhanced quantum state tomography provides the metrics to give physical descriptions of every feature observed in the quantum state with a single-shot measurement and paves a way of exploring large-scale quantum systems in real-time., Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures