Statistics of states generated by quantum-scissors device

Generating desired states is a prerequisite in quantum information. Some desired states can be generated by a quantum-scissors device (QSD). We present a detailed analysis of the properties of the generated states, including average photon numbers and intensity gains. The theoretical analysis shows that there is a nondeterministic amplification in terms of the average photon number under the condition that the average photon number of the input state is less than 1. In contrast to the input states, the generated states show the nonclassical property described by the negativity of the Wigner function. Furthermore, we generalize the QSD to truncate arbitrary photon number terms of the input states, which may be useful in high-dimensional quantum information processing. (paper)