Rapid Quantum Squeezing by Jumping the Harmonic Oscillator Frequency

Quantum sensing and quantum information processing use quantum advantages such as squeezedstates that encode a quantity of interest with higher precision and generate quantum correlations tooutperform classical methods. In harmonic oscillators, the rate of generating squeezing is set by aquantum speed limit. Therefore, the degree to which a quantum advantage can be used in practiceis limited by the time needed to create the state relative to the rate of unavoidable decoherence.Alternatively, a sudden change of harmonic oscillator's frequency projects a ground state into asqueezed state which can circumvent the time constraint. Here, we create squeezed states of atomicmotion by sudden changes of the harmonic oscillation frequency of atoms in an optical lattice.Building on this protocol, we demonstrate rapid quantum amplification of a displacement operatorthat could be used for detecting motion. Our results can speed up quantum gates and enablequantum sensing and quantum information processing in noisy environments.