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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