Strong-Driving-Assisted Probabilistic State Preparation in Cavity QED

An alternative scheme is proposed for preparing the superpositions of coherent states with controllable weighting factors along a straight line for a cavity field. The scheme is based on the interaction of a single-mode cavity field with a resonant two-level atom driven by a strong classical field. It is in contrast to the previous methods used in cavity QED of injecting a coherent state into a cavity via a microwave source. In the scheme, the interaction between the cavity mode and atoms is fully resonant, thus the required interaction time is greatly shortened. Moreover, the present scheme requires smaller numbers of operations. In view of decoherence, a reduction of interaction time and numbers of operations for the state preparation is very important for experimental implementation of quantum state engineering.