Boosting the Quantum State of a Cavity with Floquet Driving*

The striking nonlinear effects exhibited by cavity QED systems make them a powerful tool in modern condensed matter and atomic physics. A recently discovered example is the topologically quantized pumping of energy into a cavity by a strongly-coupled, periodically-driven spin. We uncover a remarkable feature of these energy pumps: they coherently translate, or boost, a quantum state of the cavity in the Fock basis. Boosting enables the preparation of highly-excited non-classical cavity states in near-term optical cavity and circuit QED experiments.