Quadrature squeezing enhances Wigner negativity in a mechanical Duffing oscillator

Understand

Generating macroscopic non-classical quantum states is a long-standing challenge in physics.

• Anharmonic dynamics is an essential ingredient to generate these states, but for large mechanical systems, the effect of the anharmonicity tends to become negligible compared to decoherence.
• As a possible solution to this challenge, we propose to use a motional squeezed state as a resource to effectively enhance the anharmonicity.
• We analyze the production of negativity in the Wigner distribution of a quantum anharmonic resonator initially in a squeezed state.