Light Switched Faster Than Its Own Oscillations express
Ordinary light always jitters a bit: its brightness and color fluctuate, like the air in a balloon after a tap. In 'squeezed' light, these fluctuations are redistributed — as if you squeeze the balloon from one side, making it thinner here and thicker there, but the total volume stays the same. This trades accuracy in one place for gains in another. This has already let gravitational wave detectors pick up vibrations thousands of times smaller than an atomic nucleus, and hear black hole collisions from billions of light-years away.
Now physicists have learned to instantly change which part of the 'balloon' gets squeezed. They fire two laser flashes at a material with a delay less than one light oscillation — the light doesn't have time to change, while the material is already rearranged. This switching happens in attoseconds (billionths of a billionth of a second). Analysis using spectroscopy shows how different colors of this light are linked, letting researchers design ideal quantum sources for future computers. Such speed could surpass modern processor speeds by billions of times.
Original abstract
as written by the authors arXiv:2512.17046
Squeezed light has revolutionized quantum metrology by enhancing interferometry for sensitive applications such as the detection of gravitational waves. Squeezed light has also played a pivotal role in quantum information science with numerous applications in quantum computing and communication. Previously, squeezed light has been primarily generated using nonlinear optical interactions, where control of the degree of squeezing was possible by tuning the nonlinearity of the generating medium using suitable material engineering. Here, we modulate the third-order nonlinear response in dielectrics with strong ultrafast laser fields to control the degree of squeezing on attosecond time scales. We demonstrate the ability to change the ultrafast squeezed light generated in the nonlinear process from amplitude-squeezed to phase-squeezed by controlling the strong-field-driven nonlinear response of the material through a sub-cycle phase delay between the input femtosecond laser pulses. The squeezing of quantum noise is measured using a frequency-resolved balanced homodyne detection scheme capable of extracting the field quadratures in different frequency modes simultaneously. Using this frequency-resolved measurement we extract the complete coherency matrix containing the quantum correlations between field quadratures across different frequency modes of the femtosecond squeezed light pulse. These results have major implications for the development of quantum light sources with unprecedented levels of control over quadrature squeezing, for applications in multimode quantum information processing, and for measuring transient quantum matter correlations via transduction to quantum field correlations in an ultrafast light-matter interaction.
Nobody physically squeezes 'squeezed' light — it's just a clever redistribution of natural noise, where reducing disturbances in one spot makes them grow in another, just like a balloon.