Toward classical emulation of quantum states with coherent mixtures

We propose a classical emulation methodology to emulate quantum phenomena arising from any non-classical quantum state using only a finite set of coherent states or their statistical mixtures. This allows us to successfully reproduce well-known quantum effects using resources that can be much more feasibly generated in the laboratory. Our results shed new light on an alternative operational meaning to non-classicality. We present a simple procedure to experimentally carry out quantum-state emulation with coherent states that also applies to any general set of classical states that are easier to generate, and demonstrate its capabilities in observing the Hong-Ou-Mandel effect, violating Bell inequalities and witnessing quantum non-classicality.