Engineering Schr\"{o}dinger cat states through cavity-assisted interaction of coherent optical pulses

We propose a scheme to engineer Schr\"{o}dinger-cat states of propagating optical pulses. Multi-dimensional and multi-partite cat states can be generated simply by reflecting coherent optical pulses successively from a single-atom cavity. The influences of various sources of noise, including the atomic spontaneous emission and the pulse shape distortion, are characterized through detailed numerical simulation, which demonstrates practicality of this scheme within the reach of current experimental technology.