Photonic Quantum Operations via the Quantum Carburettor Effect

The bosonic nature of light leads to counter-intuitive bunching effects. We describe an experimentally testable effect in which a single photon is induced through a highly reflecting beamsplitter by a large amplitude coherent state, with probability 1/e in the limit of large coherent state amplitude. We use this effect to construct a viable implementation of the bare raising operator on coherent states via conditional measurement, which succeeds with high probability and fidelity even in the high amplitude limit.