We present a protocol for measuring the quadrature of a harmonic oscillator (HO). The HO is coupled to a qubit, with an interaction modulated by the qubit control and effectively proportional to the HO quadrature
I. Repeated measurement of the qubit leads to gradually increasing information on the quadrature
I, leading to squeezing. We derive an analytical formula for the quadrature variance,
(ΔI)2=1/(1+4ϕ2s), with
ϕ the product of interaction strength and interaction time and
s the number of repetitions of the measurement. We discuss the robustness of this scheme against decoherence. We find that this protocol could lead to significant squeezing in a realistic setup formed of a superconducting flux qubit used to measure an electrical or mechanical resonator.
We study the emergence of macrorealism in a harmonic oscillator subject to consecutive measurements of a squeezed action. We demonstrate a breakdown of dynamical realism in a wide parameter range that is maximized in a scaling limit of extreme squeezing, where it is based on measurements of smooth observables, implying that macroscopic realism is not valid in the harmonic oscillator. We propose an indirect experimental test of these predictions with entangled photons by demonstrating that local realism in a composite system implies dynamical realism in a subsystem.