Caltech Develops Squeezed Light Source Based on Silicon MEMS

Photonics, Laser Focus, Caltech: Caltech Oskar Painter's group and Vienna University were able to generate squeezed light in a compact silicon MEMS resonator. Squeezed light sources can generate light with noise below the shot noise limit, usually at some specific frequencies. The new results are published at Caltech site and also in Nature journal paper:

"Squeezed light from a silicon micromechanical resonator"
Amir H. Safavi-Naeini, Simon Gröblacher, Jeff T. Hill, Jasper Chan, Markus Aspelmeyer & Oskar Painter

Also, Amir Safavi-Naeini posted a popular explanation of how his system works in Caltech's Quantum Frontiers blog.

Indeed, a nice achievement that can lead to many improvements in imaging, as we discussed a year ago. Now I'd like to see them removing a liquid Helium cryostat from the system and getting the same results at the room temperature.

(a) A SEM image of the silicon MEMS resonator used to generate squeezed light
(b) A numerical model shows the differential in-plane motion of the nanobeams.