2023/12/26 by Stefano Marti, Marti, Stefano, Uwe von Lüpke +13 · 11 citations
Engineering · Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Force Microscopy Techniques and Applications #Mechanical and Optical Resonators #Photonic and Optical Devices #Quantum Physics (quant-ph)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2312.16169
openalex publication_date 2023/12/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Mechanical degrees of freedom are natural candidates for continuous-variable quantum information processing and bosonic quantum simulations. These applications, however, require the engineering of squeezing and nonlinearities in the quantum regime. Here we demonstrate ground state squeezing of a gigahertz-frequency mechanical resonator coupled to a superconducting qubit. This is achieved by parametrically driving the qubit, which results in an effective two-phonon drive. In addition, we show that the resonator mode inherits a nonlinearity from the off-resonant coupling with the qubit, which can be tuned by controlling the detuning. We thus realize a mechanical squeezed Kerr oscillator, where we demonstrate the preparation of non-Gaussian quantum states of motion with Wigner function negativities and high quantum Fisher information. This shows that our results also have applications in quantum metrology and sensing.