Pulsed squeezed light

Abstract

The degree of squeezing generated by parametric downconversion or four-wave mixing can be limited by the ratio of the nonlinear coupling to the linear losses in many practical systems. This ratio can be enhanced by increasing the pump power used for the nonlinear coupling in many solid nonlinear systems where the linear losses are not directly related to the nonlinear squeezing process. Pulsed pump sources are attractive for optimizing the nonlinear coupling-to-loss ratio. We have shown1 that homodyne detection can be used to detect the pulsed squeezing generated by a mode-locked pulse train from the pump laser. A portion of the pump beam is used as the local oscillator which stroboscopically samples portions of the squeezed light pulse train. The amount of squeezing which can be measured as a function of the relative durations of the pump and local oscillator pulses is shown. Progress of recent experiments using both four-wave mixing and parametric downconversion is described.