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CRC Press eBooks

Quantum fluctuations and applications of squeezed light

Harry J. Kimble, G-L Oppo

Published Dec 12, 2020• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

This chapter is a short summary of recent developments concerning quantum noise. A quantum state is said to be squeezed when the fluctuations of one observable have been reduced below that of the vacuum state, that is, the ‘shot-noise’ level of the coherent state. Squeezed states are detected using the technique known as balanced homodyne detection. The chapter reviews the reductions in phase and amplitude fluctuations of a squeezed state and discusses their use in interferometry and spectroscopy. The phase-dependent nature of the squeezed field results in line-narrowing of the incoherent spectrum for particular phase choices while other choices of phase result in line-broadening. Interferometry with squeezed light as well as quantum non-demolition measurements are attempting to assess quantum measurement limits in order to further extend the experimental manipulation of light.

DOI
10.1201/9781003072973-7

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Cambridge University Press eBooks•Jul 27, 2023•0 citations
This chapter is a short summary of recent developments concerning quantum noise. A quantum state is said to be squeezed when the fluctuations of one observable have been reduced below that of the vacuum state, that is, the ‘shot-noise’ level of the coherent state. Squeezed states are detected using the technique known as balanced homodyne detection. The chapter reviews the reductions in phase and amplitude fluctuations of a squeezed state and discusses their use in interferometry and spectroscopy. The phase-dependent nature of the squeezed field results in line-narrowing of the incoherent spectrum for particular phase choices while other choices of phase result in line-broadening. Interferometry with squeezed light as well as quantum non-demolition measurements are attempting to assess quantum measurement limits in order to further extend the experimental manipulation of light.
Squeezed states of the electromagnetic field are characterized by a reduction of fluctuations for one of two quadrature phase amplitudes below the level of fluctuations for the vacuum state. This reduction is a manifestly quantum or nonclassical feature which is of great interest in its own right but also potentially important for precision measurement with sensitivity beyond the shot-noise or vacuum-state limit. We describe three different experiments in which squeezed light has been generated in our laboratory involving parametric downconversion, intracavity frequency doubling, and optical bistability with two-state atoms. By employing the squeezed light produced by a subthreshold optical parametric oscillator, we have achieved improvements in sensitivity beyond the vacuum-state limit for the detection of both phase and amplitude changes of the electromagnetic field. An alternate route to sensitivity beyond the vacuum-state limit is through quantum nondemolition measurement, where we have suggested and are implementing a scheme involving parametric conversion and polarization mixing.
The nature of phase noise in quantum optics is analyzed. In an experiment involving the measurement of the electromagnetic field the two quantities of interest are the energy and phase of the field. However, measurements of the quantities produce quantum fluctuations. The quantum fluctuations are regarded as noise in the treatment presented here. The quantum system is represented by a probability distribution, the Wigner function, and the quantum fluctuations are treated as stochastic noise associated with the quantity being measured. The difficulties of associating a quantum operator with the phase of the system are reviewed and the related energy-phase uncertainty relation is discussed. The alternate interpretation of the phase noise of a quantum system as being the classical phase noise of the Wigner function is presented. In particular the energy and phase noise of the vacuum state, the coherent state, the squeezed state and the squeezed vacuum are discussed in this way. The squeezed states of light are minimum uncertainty states with respect to the quadrature operators and exhibit noise of one quadrature below the noise level associated with the vacuum. The reduced noise level in one quadrature of the field underlies the importance of squeezed states in many practical applications where there is a need to reduce the quantum noise of one quadrature of coherent light. The periodic phase operator eliminates the difficulties associated with the multivalued nature of phase. The analysis of the vacuum and intense coherent state of Carruthers and Nieto by employing periodic phase operators is reviewed, particularly with respect to the energy-phase uncertainty relations and we generalize the approach to develop a phase operator analysis of the squeezed state in the intense field and vacuum limits. We demonstrate here for the first time that the phase operator is simply related to the phase of the squeezed state in the intense field limit and that the squeezed state is approximately an energy-phase minimum uncertainty state in the low-squeezing limit. Also we enlarge on previous work to demonstrate that the phase operator corresponds simply and unambiguously to the phase of the squeeze parameter for the strongly squeezed vacuum and the intensely squeezed vacuum is an energy-phase minimum uncertainty state for some values of phase. The occurrence of squeezing for the case of two coupled quantum oscillators is presented. The system consisting of one mode of the electromagnetic field coupled to a spinless nonrelativistic electron subjected to an harmonic potential is represented by two coupled harmonic oscillators. The dynamics are compared for the case that the rotating wave approximation is employed and for the case that the counter-rotating terms are included. These calculations have not been performed before. The parametric amplifier Hamiltonian with a nonresonant coupling is also studied in order to provide insight into the effects of the counter-rotating terms. Squeezing of the field produced by the electron is a consequence of the inclusion of the counter-rotating terms. The case of a spinless nonrelativistic electron subject to an harmonic potential and coupled to a continuum of electromagnetic field modes is also considered. The case of two coupled oscillators discussed above is generalized by replacing the oscillator which represents the single-mode field by a bath of oscillators. The effects of including counter-rotating terms and of ignoring the counter - rotating terms in the Hamiltonian are compared. The interaction is assumed to produce a frequency shift and an exponential damping term for the oscillating electron. The frequency shift is assumed to be small in either case and so the Wigner-Weisskopff approximation is employed to solve the equations of motion. We demonstrate the new results that dissipation-induced phase-dependent noise is a consequence of including the counter-rotating terms and that the noise is phase-independent for the case that the counterrotating terms are excluded. The relation between these results and recent work on quantum tunnelling in superconducting quantum interference devices is discussed. We conclude by suggesting further research related to the work in this thesis.
Measurement of the squeezed fluctuations of an optical field by the method of conditional homodyne detection is discussed. It is shown that conditional homodyne detection is able to distinguish qualitatively between vacuum-state squeezing and squeezed classical noise. Whereas for conventional squeezed-light detection, only a quantitative distinction can be made, based on the setting of the shot-noise level, under conditional detection, the presence of classical noise changes the actual shape of the measured correlation function. The correlations show a positive peak due to the unsqeezed classical noise frequencies, set inside the negative dip associated with the squeezed fluctuations. The width in time of the positive peak is the larger of the detector response time and the inverse of the classical noise bandwidth. The fundamental distinction between vacuum-state squeezing and squeezed classical noise is that there is no positive peak, even in the limiting form of a delta-function, when the unsqueezed frequencies correspond to vacuum state modes. Implications for the literal interpretation of vacuum fluctuations, such as is adopted in stochastic electrodynamics, are discussed. The ideas are presented in general terms and illustrated by an example which treats the generation and detection of broadband squeezed light, including finite-bandwidth classical noise, within the framework of the quantum trajectory theory of cascaded open systems.
Improvements in precision beyond the limit set by the vacuum state or zero-point fluctuations of the field are reported for two optical experiments. Both experiments employ the squeezed light from an optical parametric oscillator to reduce the level of fluctuations in one of two quadrature phase amplitudes below the shot-noise level (SNL). The first experiment follows the work of Caves1 on precision interferometry with squeezed states. An increase in signal-to-noise of 2.5 dB relative to the SNL is demonstrated for the detection of phase modulation in a Mach-Zehnder interferometer. In the second experiment amplitude modulation is encoded on a weak signal beam with an acoustooptic modulator. For the case of a squeezed signal beam compared with a beam in a coherent state, an improvement in sensitivity of 2.5 dB is achieved for the detection of amplitude changes of the field. The observed increases in sensitivity in both experiments are currently limited by simple linear losses in propagation and detection and not by the degree of available squeezing.
Experimental chapter devoted to quantum observables endowed with continuously varying quantum fluctuations, such as position and momentum, quadrature operators, or phase and amplitude of electromagnetic fields . It shows that one can manipulate this quantum noise by generating squeezed states of light, always within the limits imposed by the Heisenberg inequality, and create strong correlations between these observables to conditionally generate quantum states having intensity quantum fluctuations below the "shot noise" limit imposed by the existence of vacuum fluctuations. Describes an experiment dealing with macroscopic mechanical oscillators displaying motional squeezing below the zero point fluctuations, and another one dealing with macroscopic superconducting exhibiting a whole spectrum of strongly nonclassical states, generated by using the strong anharmonicity of the Josephson potential.