Suppressing Recoil Heating in Levitated Optomechanics using Squeezed Light

Understand

We theoretically show that laser recoil heating in free-space levitated optomechanics can be arbitrarily suppressed by shining squeezed light onto an optically trapped nanoparticle.

• The presence of squeezing modifies the quantum electrodynamical light-matter interaction in a way that enables us to control the amount of information that the scattered light carries about a given mechanical degree of freedom.
• Moreover, we analyze the trade-off between measurement imprecision and back-action noise and show that optical detection beyond the standard quantum limit can be achieved.
• We predict that, with state-of-the-art squeezed light sources, laser recoil heating can be reduced by at least 60% by squeezing a single Gaussian mode with an appropriate incidence direction, and by 98% by squeezing a properly mode-matched mode.