Two-mode squeezed vacuum states are a crucial component of quantum technologies. In the microwave domain, they can be produced by Josephson ring modulator which acts as a three-wavemixing non-degenerate parametric amplifier. Here, we solve the master equation of three bosonic modes describing the Josephson ring modulator with a novel numerical method to compute squeezing of output fields and gain at low signal power. We show that the third-order interaction from the three-wave mixing process intrinsically limits squeezing and reduces gain. Since our results are related to other general cavity-based three-wave mixing processes, these imply that any non-degenerate parametric amplifier will have an intrinsic squeezing limit in the output fields.
We propose a realistic scheme of generating a traveling odd Schr$“o$dinger cat state and a generalized entangled coherent state in circuit quantum electrodynamics (circuit-QED).A squeezed vacuum state is used as initial resource of nonclassical states, which can be created through a Josephson traveling-wave parametric amplifier, and travels through a transmission line. Because a single-photon subtraction from the squeezed vacuum gives with very high fidelity an odd Schr$\“o$dinger cat state, we consider a specific circuit-QED setup consisting of the Josephson amplifier creating the traveling resource in a line, a beam-splitter coupling two transmission lines, and a single photon detector located at the end of the other line. When a single microwave photon is detected by measuring the excited state of a superconducting qubit in the detector, a heralded cat state is generated with high fidelity in the opposite line. For example, we show that the high fidelity of the outcome with the ideal cat state can be achieved with appropriate squeezing parameters theoretically. As its extended setup, we suggest that generalized entangled coherent states can be also built probabilistically and useful for microwave quantum information processing for error-correctable qudits in circuit-QED.