Optimal Linear-Optical Noiseless Quantum Amplifiers Driven by Auxiliary Multiphoton Fock States

We investigate linear optical noiseless quantum amplifiers driven by auxiliary Fock states and photon number measurements. We seek optimal interferometric schemes that maximize the probability of success of such noiseless quantum amplifiers and we focus on fixed linear optical interferometric setups that do not involve feed-forward. We first investigate noiseless amplifiers based on the quantum-scissors scheme and then extend our analysis to general interferometric couplings. We find that the more general interferometric couplings can outperform the quantum scissors. For noiseless amplifiers driven by an auxiliary single-photon state we recover the single-photon catalysis as an efficient noiseless amplification configuration for setups without feed-forward. We complement our analysis of linear optical noiseless quantum amplifiers by discussion of the general form of single-mode linear optical quantum operations driven by auxiliary N-photon state.