Classical Simulation of Squeezed Vacuum in Optical Waveguide Arrays

Abstract

We reveal that classical light diffraction in arrays of specially modulated coupled optical waveguides can simulate the quantum process of two-mode squeezing in nonlinear media, with the waveguide mode amplitudes corresponding the signal and idler photon numbers. The whole Fock space is mapped by a set of arrays, where each array represents the states with a fixed difference between the signal and idler photon numbers. We demonstrate a critical transition from photon number growth to Bloch oscillations with periodical revivals of an arbitrary input state, associated with an increase of the effective phase mismatch between the pump and the squeezed photons.