The “Squeeze Laser”

Abstract

The level of quantum noise in measurements is bounded from below by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, but it can be unequally distributed between two non-commuting observables — it can be “squeezed”. Since 2019, all gravitational-wave observatories have been using squeezed light for increasing the astronomical reach. Squeezed laser light is efficiently produced by degenerate parametric down-conversion in a nonlinear crystal located inside an optical resonator. A spontaneously generated initial pair of indistinguishable photons is amplified to a squeezed vacuum state. Overlapped with bright coherent light, the photo electric measurement shows a sub-Poissonian photon statistics. Squeezed states have ample applications in nonlocal quantum sensing, device-independent quantum key distribution, and quantum computing. Here, we present our continuous-wave 1550 nm ‘squeeze laser’ with a footprint of 80 cm × 80 cm. The well-defined output beam has an interference contrast of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\gtrsim 99\%$</tex-math></inline-formula> with an overlapped 10 mW beam being in an almost perfect TEM00 mode. The interference result shows 13 dB squeezing of the photon shot noise in balanced detection.