State dependent motional squeezing of a trapped ion: new method and applications

Abstract

We show that the motion of a cold trapped ion can be squeezed by modulating the intensity of a phase-stable optical lattice placed inside the trap. As this method is reversible and state selective it effectively implements a controlled-squeeze gate. We show how to use this resource, that can be useful for quantum information processing with continuous variables, in order to prepare coherent superpositions of states which are squeezed along complementary quadratures. We show that these states, which we denote as "${\mathcal X}$-states", exhibit high sensitivity to small displacements along two complementary quadratures which make them useful for quantum metrology.