Squeezed lasing

Abstract

We introduce the concept of a squeezed laser, in which a squeezed cavity mode develops a macroscopic photonic occupation due to stimulated emission. Above the lasing threshold, the emitted light retains both the spectral purity of a laser and the photon correlations characteristic of quadrature squeezing. Our proposal, implementable in optical setups, relies on a combination of the parametric driving of the cavity and the excitation by a broadband squeezed vacuum to achieve lasing behavior in a squeezed cavity mode. The squeezed laser can find applications that go beyond those of standard lasers thanks to the squeezed character, such as the direct application in Michelson interferometry beyond the standard quantum limit, or its use in atomic metrology