The notions of qubits and coherent states correspond to different physical
systems and are described by specific formalisms. Qubits are associated with a
two-dimensional Hilbert space and can be illustrated on the Bloch sphere. In
contrast, the underlying Hilbert space of coherent states is
infinite-dimensional and the states are typically represented in phase space.
For the particular case of binary coherent state alphabets these otherwise
distinct formalisms can equally be applied. We capitalize this formal
connection to analyse the properties of optimally cloned binary coherent
states. Several practical and near-optimal cloning schemes are discussed and
the associated fidelities are compared to the performance of the optimal
cloner.Comment: 12 pages, 12 figure
