Arbitrarily large steady-state bosonic squeezing via dissipation

We discuss how large amounts of steady-state quantum squeezing (beyond 3 dB) of a mechanical resonator can be obtained by driving an optomechanical cavity with two control lasers with differing amplitudes. The scheme does not rely on any explicit measurement or feedback, nor does it simply involve a modulation of an optical spring constant. Instead, it uses a dissipative mechanism with the driven cavity acting as an engineered reservoir. It can equivalently be viewed as a coherent feedback process, obtained by minimally perturbing the quantum nondemolition measurement of a single mechanical quadrature. This shows that in general the concepts of coherent feedback schemes and reservoir engineering are closely related. We analyze how to optimize the scheme, how the squeezing scales with system parameters, and how it may be directly detected from the cavity output. Our scheme is extremely general, and could also be implemented with, e.g., superconducting circuits.