• Accepted Paper

Scalable generation of macroscopic Fock states exceeding 10,000 photons

Ming Li, Weizhou Cai, Ziyue Hua, Yifang Xu, Yilong Zhou, Zi-Jie Chen, Xu-Bo Zou, Guang-Can Guo, Luyan Sun, and Chang-Ling Zou

Phys. Rev. Lett. - Accepted 2 November, 2026

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/plv9-bn9t

Abstract

The scalable preparation of bosonic quantum states with macroscopic excitations poses a fundamental challenge in quantum technologies, limited by control complexity and photon-loss rates that severely constrain prior theoretical and experimental efforts to merely dozens of excitations per mode. Here, based on the duality of the quantum state evolution in Fock-state space and the optical wave-function propagation in a waveguide array, we introduce a Kerr-engineered multilens protocol in a single bosonic mode to deterministically generate Fock states exceeding 10, 000 photons. By optimizing phase and displacement operations across lens groups, our approach compensates for non-paraxial aberrations, achieving fidelities above 0.73 (0.61) in numerical simulations for photon numbers up to 10, 000 (100, 000). Counterintuitively, the protocol’s execution time scales as N [−][1][/][2] with the target photon number N, exhibiting robustness against the photon loss. Our framework enables exploration of quantum-to-classical transitions of giant Fock states, paving the way for advanced quantum metrology with significant quantum gains, and error-corrected quantum information processing in high-dimensional Hilbert spaces.

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