Two-mode squeezing in an electromechanical resonator

A mechanical resonator integrated with piezoelectric transducers enables mechanical nonlinearities to be dynamically engineered to emulate non-degenerate parametric down-conversion. In this configuration, millions of phonons are simultaneously generated in pairs in two macroscopic vibration modes, which results in the amplification of their motion by more than 20 dB. Mechanical two-mode squeezed states are also created in parallel, which exhibit fluctuations 5 dB below the thermal level of their constituent modes and they harbor correlations between the modes that become perfect as their amplification is increased. This remarkable observation of correlations between two massive phonon ensembles establishes the means to create an entangled macroscopic mechanical system at the single phonon level. Copyright © 2015 NTT Technical Review.