Majorization ladder in bosonic Gaussian channels

Zacharie Van Herstraeten, Michael G. Jabbour, Nicolas J. Cerf

Published 2022-09-17Version 1

We show the existence of a majorization ladder in bosonic Gaussian channels, that is, we prove that the channel output resulting from the $n\text{th}$ energy eigenstate (Fock state) majorizes the channel output resulting from the $(n\!+\!1)\text{th}$ energy eigenstate (Fock state). This reflects a remarkable link between the energy at the input of the channel and a disorder relation at its output as captured by majorization theory. This result was previously known in the special cases of a pure-loss channel and quantum-limited amplifier, and we achieve here its nontrivial generalization to any single-mode phase-covariant (or -contravariant) bosonic Gaussian channel. The key to our proof is the explicit construction of a column-stochastic matrix that relates the outputs of the channel for any two subsequent Fock states at its input, which is made possible by exploiting a recently found recurrence relation on multiphoton transition probabilities for Gaussian unitaries [M. G. Jabbour and N. J. Cerf, Phys. Rev. Research 3, 043065 (2021)]. We then discuss possible generalizations and implications of our results.