Nonlinear cooling and control of a mechanical quantum harmonic oscillator.

A trapped-ion mechanical quantum harmonic oscillator in the strongly nonlinear atom-light regime enables generation of localized multi-component (two through five) Schrödinger’s cat manifolds.

• Why it matters: Strong nonlinearities can support nonclassical control, but they also make protocol design difficult, limiting full exploitation of these effects for quantum harmonic oscillators.
• What they did: The team uses a novel nonlinear reservoir engineering method to create two-, three-, four-, and five-component cat manifolds, then selects Hamiltonians to measure those manifolds.
• The result: The experiment shows high-order nonlinear processes can control nonclassical oscillator states, providing a toolbox applicable to bosonic quantum error correction, computation, and sensing.

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