Magnon squeezing in an antiferromagnet: reducing the spin noise below the standard quantum limit

JIMIN ZHAO; ANDREA V. BRAGAS; DAVID J. LOCKWOOD ; ROBERTO MERLIN

PHYSICAL REVIEW LETTERS

AMER PHYSICAL SOC

Lugar: New York; Año: 2004 vol. 93 p. 107203 - 107203

0031-9007

We report the first experimental demonstration of quantum squeezing of a collective spin-wave excitation (magnon) using femtosecond optical pulses to generate correlations involving pairs of spins in an antiferromagnetic insulator MnF2. In the squeezed state, the fluctuations of the magnetization of a crystallographic unit cell vary periodically in time and are reduced below that of the ground-state quantum noise.