Tradeoff between Wigner negativity and decoherence time for cubic Gaussian states

Wigner negativity has been shown to be a resource in quantum computing, raising the question of how to efficiently produce states with a large Wigner negativity. Cubic Gaussian states, obtained when a cubic gate is applied to a Gaussian state, have been proposed as candidates for this purpose. We show that cubic Gaussian states with a large Wigner negativity N necessarily have a short decoherence time τ that is bounded above by N-2. In other words, a large Wigner negativity comes at a cost: the decoherence time τ of cubic Gaussian states decreases at least quadratically in the negativity N. Maximizing τ at fixed Wigner negativity N, we show that this upper bound is reached by optimal cubic Gaussian states. They have the property that for large negativity, the optimal squeezing scales as N and the optimal cubicity as N-1. Optimal cubic Gaussian states with large negativity can therefore be constructed with small cubicity, provided sufficient squeezing is applied. However, their decoherence time decreases with growing negativity. In addition, we show that their preparation is extremely sensitive to thermal noise. Finally, we compare, for each integer n, the optimal cubic Gaussian state with the n th Fock state that has the same negativity: despite their pronounced differences in photon number distribution and Wigner function, we show that they have similar, be it slightly larger, decoherence times and entanglement generating potential through a beam splitter.