Engineering the quantum states of light in a Kerr-nonlinear resonator by two-photon driving

Photonic cat states stored in high-Q resonators show great promise for hardware efficient universal quantum computing. We propose an approach to efficiently prepare such cat states in a Kerr-nonlinear resonator by the use of a two-photon drive. Significantly, we show that this preparation is robust against single-photon loss. An outcome of this observation is that a two-photon drive can eliminate undesirable phase evolution induced by a Kerr nonlinearity. By exploiting the concept of transitionless quantum driving, we moreover demonstrate how non-adiabatic initialization of cat states is possible. Finally, we present a universal set of quantum logical gates that can be performed on the engineered eigenspace of such a two-photon driven resonator and discuss a possible realization using superconducting circuits. The robustness of the engineered subspace to higher-order circuit nonlinearities makes this implementation favorable for scalable quantum computation.