We study the quantum properties of a nanomechanical oscillator via the squeezing of the oscillator amplitude. The static longitudinal compressive force
F0 close to a critical value at the Euler buckling instability leads to an anharmonic term in the Hamiltonian and thus the squeezing properties of the nanomechanical oscillator are to be obtained from the Hamiltonian of the form
H=a†a+β(a†+a)4/4. This Hamiltonian has no exact solution unlike the other known models of nonlinear interactions of the forms
a†2a2,
(a†a)2 and
a†4+a4−(a†2a2+a2a†2) previously employed in quantum optics to study squeezing. Here we solve the Schrödinger equation numerically and show that in-phase quadrature gets squeezed for both ground state and coherent states. The squeezing can be controlled by bringing
F0 close to or far from the critical value
Fc. We further study the effect of the transverse driving force on the squeezing in nanomechanical oscillator.
It is shown that squeezing will inevitably be generated in a harmonic oscillator with time-dependent frequency for any nonvanishing rate of frequency change, sudden or smooth. The general form of the time-dependent transition probabilities among the eigenstates of the initial Hamiltonian is obtained with an exact operator approach. Results for the case of a sudden frequency jump are explicitly given as an illustration. It is also pointed out that to generate squeezing in a harmonic oscillator, the Hamiltonian does not have to be a unitary squeeze transformation of the free Hamiltonian.