Exploring a New Regime for Processing Optical Qubits: Squeezing and Unsqueezing Single Photons

We implement the squeezing operation as a genuine quantum gate, deterministically and reversibly acting online upon an input state no longer restricted to the set of Gaussian states. More specifically, by applying an efficient and robust squeezing operation for the first time to non-Gaussian states, we demonstrate a two-way conversion between a particlelike single-photon state and a wavelike superposition of coherent states. Our squeezing gate is reliable enough to preserve the negativities of the corresponding Wigner functions. This demonstration represents an important and necessary step towards hybridizing discrete and continuous quantum protocols.