In this Paper we present an approach to Quantum Mechanical Canonical Transformations. Our main result is that Time Dependent Quantum Canonical Transformations can always be cast in the form of Squeezing Operators. We revise the main properties of these operators in regard to its Lie group properties, how two of them can be combined to yield another operator of the same class and how can also be decomposed and fragmented. In the second part of the paper we show how this procedure works extremely well for the Time Dependent Quantum Harmonic Oscillator. The issue of the systematic construction of Quantum Canonical Transformations is also discussed along the lines of Dirac, Wigner and Schwinger ideas and to the more recent work by Lee. The main conclusion is that the Classical Phase Space Transformation can be maintained in the operator formalism but the construction of the Quantum Canonical Transformation is not clearly related to the Classical Generating Function of a Classical Canonical Transformation. We propose the road of Squeezing Operators rather than the old one attached to Quantum Operators constructed under the guideline of the exponential of the Classical Generating Function.
Quantum squeezing of mechanical resonator is important for studying the macroscopic quantum effects and the precision metrology of weak forces. Here we give a theoretical study of a hybrid atom-optomechanical system in which the steady-state squeezing of the mechanical resonator can be generated via the mechanical nonlinearity and cavity cooling process. The validity of the scheme is assessed by simulating the steady-state variance of the mechanical displacement quadrature numerically. The scheme is robust against dissipation of the optical cavity, and the steady-state squeezing can be effecti…
Nonclassical states of macroscopic objects are promising for ultrasensitive metrology as well as testing quantum mechanics. In this work, we investigate dissipative mechanical quantum state engineering in an optically levitated nanodiamond. First, we study single-mode mechanical squeezed states by magnetically coupling the mechanical motion to a dressed three-level system provided by a Nitrogen-vacancy center in the nanoparticle. Quantum coherence between the dressed levels is created via microwave fields to induce a two-phonon transition, which results in mechanical squeezing. Remarkably, we …
We study how strong mechanical squeezing (beyond 3 dB) can be achieved through reservoir engineering in an optomechanical system which is far from the resolved-sideband regime. In our proposed setup, the effect of unwanted counter-rotating terms is suppressed by quantum interference from two auxiliary cavities. In the weak coupling regime we develop an analytical treatment based on the effective master equation approach, which allows us to obtain explicitly the condition of maximum squeezing.
Witnessing quantumness in mesoscopic objects is an important milestone for both quantum technologies and foundational reasons. Cavity optomechanics offers the ideal system to achieve this by combing high precision optical measurements with mechanical oscillators. However, mechanical quantumness can only be established if the behaviour is incompatible with any classical description of an oscillator. After explicitly considering classical and hybrid quantum-classical descriptions of an optomechanical system, we rule out squeezing of the optical field as such a witness by showing it is also predi…
Squeezing of quantum fluctuation plays an important role in fundamental quantum physics and has marked influence on ultrasensitive detection. We propose a scheme to generate and enhance the squeezing of mechanical mode by exposing the optomechanical system to a non-Markovian environment. It is shown that the effective parametric resonance term of mechanical mode can be induced due to the interaction with cavity and non-Markovian reservoir, thus resulting in quadrature squeezing of the mechanical resonator. And jointing the two kinds of interactions can enhance the squeezing effect. Comparing w…
We solve the time evolution of a nonlinear optomechanical Hamiltonian with arbitrary time-dependent mechanical displacement, mechanical single-mode squeezing and a time-dependent optomechanical coupling up to the solution of two second-order differential equations. The solution is based on identifying a minimal and finite Lie algebra that generates the time-evolution of the system. This reduces the problem to considering a finite set of coupled ordinary differential equations of real functions. To demonstrate the applicability of our method, we compute the degree of non-Gaussianity of the time…
In this paper, we investigate theoretically the quantum state transfer in a laser driven hybrid optomechanical cavity with two Duffing-like anharmonic movable end mirrors containing an ensemble of identical two-level trapped atoms. The quantum state transfer from the Bogoliubov modes of the two anharmonic oscillators to the atomic mode results in the atomic quadrature squeezing beyond the standard quantum limit of 3 dB which can be controlled by both the optomechanical and atom-field coupling strengths. Interestingly, the generated atomic squeezing can be made robust against the noise sources …
Mesoscopic mechanical oscillators can be prepared in quantum states and coherently manipulated using the optomechanical interaction. This has recently been used to prepare squeezed mechanical states. However, the scheme used in these experiments relies on slow, dissipative evolution that destroys the system's memory of its initial state. In this paper we propose a protocol based on a sequence of four pulsed optomechanical interactions. In addition to being coherent, our scheme executes in a time much shorter than a mechanical period. We analyse applications in impulsive force sensing and prese…
We use a reservoir engineering technique based on two-tone driving to generate and stabilize a quantum squeezed state of a micron-scale mechanical oscillator in a microwave optomechanical system. Using an independent backaction evading measurement to directly quantify the squeezing, we observe $4.7\pm0.9$ dB of squeezing below the zero-point level, surpassing the 3 dB limit of standard parametric squeezing techniques. Our measurements also reveal evidence for an additional mechanical parametric effect. The interplay between this effect and the optomechanical interaction enhances the amount of …
Quantum squeezing in mechanical systems is not only a key signature of macroscopic quantum effects, but can also be utilized to advance the metrology of weak forces. Here we show that strong mechanical squeezing in the steady state can be generated in an optomechanical system with mechanical nonlinearity and red-detuned monochromatic driving on the cavity mode. The squeezing is achieved as the joint effect of nonlinearity-induced parametric amplification and cavity cooling, and is robust against thermal fluctuations of the mechanical mode.
Processing quantum information on continuous variables requires a highly nonlinear element in order to attain universality. Noise reduction in processing such quantum information involves the use of a nonlinear phase state as a non-Gaussian ancilla. A necessary condition for a nonlinear phase state to implement a nonlinear phase gate is that noise in a selected nonlinear quadrature should decrease below the level of classical states. A reduction of the variance in this nonlinear quadrature below the ground state of the ancilla, a type of nonlinear squeezing, is the resource embedded in these n…
Generation of squeezed light and optomechanical instability for dissipative type of opto- mechanical coupling is theoretically addressed for a cavity with the input mirror, serving as a mechanical oscillator, or an equivalent system. The problem is treated analytically for the case of resonance excitation or small detunings, mainly focusing on the bad cavity limit. A qualitative difference between the dissipative and purely dispersive coupling is reported. In particular, it is shown that, for the purely dissipative coupling in the bad cavity regime, the backaction is strongly reduced and the s…
Quantum squeezing and entanglement of spins can be used to improve the sensitivity in quantum metrology. Here we propose a scheme to create collective coupling of an ensemble of spins to mechanical vibrational mode actuated by an external magnetic field. We find an evolution time where the mechanical motion decouples from the spins, and the accumulated geometric phase yields a squeezing of $5.9~\text{dB}$ for $20$ spins. We also show the creation of a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger spin state for $20$ spins with a fidelity of $\sim 0.62$ at cryogenic temperature. The numerical simulations show th…
Levitated particles are a promising platform for precision sensing of external perturbations and probing the boundary between quantum and classical worlds. A critical obstacle for these applications is the difficulty of generating nonclassical states of motion which have not been realized so far. Here, we show that strong squeezing of the motion of a levitated particle below the vacuum level is feasible with available experimental parameters. Using suitable modulation of the trapping potential (which is impossible with clamped mechanical resonators) and coherent scattering of trapping photons …
It has been predicted and experimentally demonstrated that by injecting squeezed light into an optomechanical device it is possible to enhance the precision of a position measurement. Here, we present a fundamentally different approach where the squeezing is created directly inside the cavity by a nonlinear medium. Counterintuitively, the enhancement of the signal to noise ratio works by de-amplifying precisely the quadrature that is sensitive to the mechanical motion without losing quantum information. This enhancement works for systems with a weak optomechanical coupling and/or strong mechan…
We analyze how the radiation pressure interaction between a mechanical element and an intensely driven optical cavity mode can be exploited for generating squeezed light. We study in particular how the performance of the optomechanical device can be improved when a homodyne-based feedback loop is added to control the motion of the mechanical element of the system. We show that, when driving the cavity at resonance, an appropriate proportional feedback control is able to improve the generation of ponderomotive squeezing, which should be detectable with state-of-the-art apparatuses.
Canonical transformations are defined and discussed along with the exponential, the coherent and the ultracoherent vectors. It is shown that the single-mode and the $n$-mode squeezing operators are elements of the group of canonical transformations. An application of canonical transformations is made, in the context of open quantum systems, by studying the effect of squeezing of the bath on the decoherence properties of the system. Two cases are analyzed. In the first case the bath consists of a massless bosonic field with the bath reference states being the squeezed vacuum states and squeezed…
Canonical transformations are ubiquitous in Hamiltonian mechanics, since they not only describe the fundamental invariance of the theory under phase-space reparameterisations, but also generate the dynamics of the system. In the first part of this work we study the symplectic structure associated with linear canonical transformations. After reviewing salient mathematical properties of the symplectic group in a pedagogical way, we introduce the squeezing formalism, and show how any linear dynamics can be cast in terms of an invariant representation. In the second part, we apply these results to…
Entanglement and quantum squeezing have wide applications in quantum technologies due to their non-classical characteristics. Here we study entanglement and quantum squeezing in an open spin-optomechanical system, in which a Rabi model (a spin coupled to the mechanical oscillator) is coupled to an ancillary cavity field via a quadratic optomechanical coupling. We find that their performances can be significantly modulated via the photon of the ancillary cavity, which comes from photon-dependent spin-oscillator coupling and detuning. Specifically, a fully switchable spin-oscillator entanglement…
In this paper, we study theoretically a hybrid optomechanical system consisting of a degenerate optical parametric amplifier inside a driven optical cavity with a moving end mirror which is modeled as a stiffening Duffing-like anharmonic quantum mechanical oscillator. By providing analytical expressions for the critical values of the system parameters corresponding to the emergence of the multistability behavior in the steady-state response of the system, we show that the stiffening mechanical Duffing anharmonicity reduces the width of the multistability region while the optical parametric non…
We consider an optomechanical cavity with a movable end-mirror as a quantum mechanical oscillator (MO) containing an interacting cigar-shaped Bose-Eisenstein condensate (BEC). It is assumed that both the MO and the BEC interact with the radiation pressure of the cavity field in the red-detuned and weak coupling regimes while the two-body atomic collisions frequency of the BEC and the mechanical spring coefficient of the MO are coherently modulated. By analyzing the scattering matrix we find that a frequency-dependent squeezing is induced to the three subsystems only due to the coherent modulat…
A localized free particle is represented by a wave packet and its motion is discussed in most quantum mechanics textbooks. Implicit in these discussions is the assumption of zero temperature. We discuss how the effects of finite temperature and squeezing can be incorporated in an elementary manner. The results show how the introduction of simple tools and ideas can bring the reader into contact with topics at the frontiers of research in quantum mechanics. We discuss the standard quantum limit, which is of interest in the measurement of small forces, and decoherence of a mixed (``Schrodinger c…
The linear optical creation of Gaussian cluster states, a potential resource for universal quantum computation, is investigated. We show that for any Gaussian cluster state, the canonical generation scheme in terms of QND-type interactions, can be entirely replaced by off-line squeezers and beam splitters. Moreover, we find that, in terms of squeezing resources, the canonical states are rather wasteful and we propose a systematic way to create cheaper states. As an application, we consider Gaussian cluster computation in multiple-rail encoding. This encoding may reduce errors due to finite squ…
We discuss generic spin squeezing operators (quadratic in angular momentum operators) capable of squeezing out quantum mechanical noise from a system of two-level atoms (spins) in a coherent state. Such systems have been considered by Kitagawa and Ueda (Refs. 2) in this context and a Hamiltonian of this nature governs the Lipkin model (Ref. 14) which is relevant to nuclear physics.
A scheme to squeeze the center-of-mass motional quadratures of a quantum mechanical oscillator below its standard quantum limit is proposed and analyzed theoretically. It relies on the dipole-dipole coupling between a magnetic dipole mounted on the tip of a cantilever to equally oriented dipoles located on a mesoscopic tuning fork. We also investigate the influence of several sources of noise on the achievable squeezing, including classical noise in the driving fork and the clamping noise in the oscillator. A detection of the state of the cantilever based on state transfer to a light field is …
We revisit quantum state preparation of an oscillator by continuous linear position measurement. Quite general analytical expressions are derived for the conditioned state of the oscillator. Remarkably, we predict that quantum squeezing is possible outside of both the backaction dominated and quantum coherent oscillation regimes, relaxing experimental requirements even compared to ground-state cooling. This provides a new way to generate non-classical states of macroscopic mechanical oscillators, and opens the door to quantum sensing and tests of quantum macroscopicity at room temperature.
We study the stationary and nonstationary measurement of a classical force driving a mechanical oscillator coupled to an electromagnetic cavity under two-tone driving. For this purpose, we develop a theoretical framework based on the signal-to-noise ratio to quantify the sensitivity of linear spectral measurements. Then, we consider stationary force sensing and study the necessary conditions to minimise the added force noise. We find that imprecision noise and back-action noise can be arbitrarily suppressed by manipulating the amplitudes of the input coherent fields, however, the force noise p…
Backaction-evading measurements of mechanical motion can achieve precision below the zero-point uncertainty and quantum squeezing, which makes them a resource for quantum metrology and quantum information processing. We provide an exact expression for the conditional state of an optomechanical system in a two-tone backaction-evading measurement beyond the standard adiabatic approximation and perform extensive numerical simulations to go beyond the usual rotating-wave approximation. We predict the simultaneous presence of conditional mechanical squeezing, intra-cavity squeezing, and optomechani…
We create squeezed light by exploiting the quantum nature of the mechanical interaction between laser light and a membrane mechanical resonator embedded in an optical cavity. The radiation pressure shot noise (fluctuating optical force from quantum laser amplitude noise) induces resonator motion well above that of thermally driven motion. This motion imprints a phase shift on the laser light, hence correlating the amplitude and phase noise, a consequence of which is optical squeezing. We experimentally demonstrate strong and continuous optomechanical squeezing of 1.7 +/- 0.2 dB below the shot …
We realize a nondegenerate parametric amplifier in an ultrahigh $Q$ mechanical membrane resonator and demonstrate two-mode thermomechanical noise squeezing. Our measurements are accurately described by a two-mode model that attributes this nonlinear mechanical interaction to a substrate-mediated process which is dramatically enhanced by the quality factors of the individual modes. This realization of strong multimode nonlinearities in a mechanical platform compatible with quantum-limited optical detection and cooling makes this a powerful system for nonlinear approaches to quantum metrology, t…
The radiation pressure coupling between a low-mass moving mirror and an incident light field has been experimentally studied in a high-finesse Fabry-Perot cavity. Using classical intensity noise in order to mimic radiation pressure quantum fluctuations, the physics of ponderomotive squeezing comes into play as a result of the opto-mechanical correlations between the field quadratures. The same scheme can be used to probe ponderomotive squeezing at the quantum level, thus opening new routes in quantum optics and high sensitivity measurement experiments.
We show that substantial quantum squeezing of mechanical motion can be achieved for micron-sized cantilever devices fabricated using available techniques. A method is also described for measuring the cantilever fluctuation magnitudes in the squeezing regime.
The radiation-pressure interaction between one or more laser fields and a mechanical oscillator gives rise to a wide range of phenomena: from sideband cooling and backaction-evading measurements to pondermotive and mechanical squeezing to entanglement and motional sideband asymmetry. In many protocols, such as dissipative mechanical squeezing, multiple lasers are utilized, giving rise to periodically driven optomechanical systems. Here we show that in this case, Floquet dynamics can arise due to presence of Kerr-type nonlinearities, which are ubiqitious in optomechanical systems. Specifically,…
We theoretically show that strong mechanical quantum squeezing in a linear optomechanical system can be rapidly generated through the dynamical instability reached in the far red-detuned and ultrastrong coupling regime. We show that this mechanism, which harnesses unstable multimode quantum dynamics, is particularly suited to levitated optomechanics, and we argue for its feasibility for the case of a levitated nanoparticle coupled to a microcavity via coherent scattering. We predict that for sub-millimeter-sized cavities the particle motion, initially thermal and well above its ground state, b…
The multipartite entangled state $|p,ξ_2,ξ_2,...,ξ_n>$ for the total momentum and relative coordinates of n particles is constructed. The corresponding quantum mechanical operator with respect to the classical transformation $p\to e^{λ_1} p$, $ξ_i\to e^{λ_i} ξ_i$, $i=1,...,n$, in the state $|p,ξ_2,ξ_2,...,ξ_n>$ is investigated.
As a result of the quantum, wave-like nature of the physical world, a harmonic oscillator can never be completely at rest. Even in the quantum ground state, its position will always have fluctuations, called the zero-point motion. Although the zero-point fluctuations are unavoidable, they can be manipulated. In this work, using microwave frequency radiation pressure, we both prepare a micron-scale mechanical system in a state near the quantum ground state and then manipulate its thermal fluctuations to produce a stationary, quadrature-squeezed state. We deduce that the variance of one motional…
Planar squeezed states, i.e. quantum states which are squeezed in two orthogonal spin components, have recently attracted attention due to their applications in atomic interferometry and quantum information [Q. Y. He et al, New J. Phys. 14, 093012 (2012)]. While canonical variables such as quadratures of the radiation field can be squeezed in at most one component, simultaneous squeezing in two orthogonal spin components can be achieved due to the angular momentum commutation relations. We present a novel scheme for planar squeezing via quantum non-demolition (QND) measurements in spin-1 syste…
A process which strongly amplifies both quadrature amplitudes of an oscillatory signal necessarily adds noise. Alternatively, if the information in one quadrature is lost in phase-sensitive amplification, it is possible to completely reconstruct the other quadrature. Here we demonstrate such a nearly perfect phase-sensitive measurement using a cavity optomechanical scheme, characterized by an extremely small noise less than 0.2 quanta. We also observe microwave radiation strongly squeezed by 8 dB below vacuum. A source of bright squeezed microwaves opens up applications in manipulations of qua…
We study the quantum measurement of a cantilever using a parametrically-coupled electromagnetic cavity which is driven at the two sidebands corresponding to the mechanical motion. This scheme, originally due to Braginsky et al. [V. Braginsky, Y. I. Vorontsov, and K. P. Thorne, Science 209, 547 (1980)], allows a back-action free measurement of one quadrature of the cantilever's motion, and hence the possibility of generating a squeezed state. We present a complete quantum theory of this system, and derive simple conditions on when the quantum limit on the added noise can be surpassed. We also s…
In recent experiments, the re-thermalization time of the mechanical resonator is stated as the limiting factor for quantum applications of optomechanical systems. To explain the origin of this limitation, an analytical nonlinear investigation supported by the recent successful experimental laser cooling parameters is carried out in this work. To this end, the effects of geometrical and the optical nonlinearities on the squeezing are studied and are in a good agreement with the experimental results. It appears that highly squeezed state are generated where these nonlinearities are minimized and…
We develop a systematic theory of quantum fluctuations in the driven parametric oscillator (OPO), including the region near threshold. This allows us to treat the limits imposed by nonlinearities to quantum squeezing and noise reduction, in this non-equilibrium quantum phase-transition. In particular, we compute the squeezing spectrum near threshold, and calculate the optimum value. We find that the optimal noise reduction occurs at different driving fields, depending on the ratio of damping rates. The largest spectral noise reductions are predicted to occur with a very high-Q second-harmonic …
