Noise Squeezing in a Nanomechanical Duffing Resonator

We study mechanical amplification and noise squeezing in a nonlinear nanomechanical resonator driven by an intense pump near its dynamical bifurcation point, namely, the onset of Duffing bistability. Phase sensitive amplification is achieved by a homodyne detection scheme, where the displacement detector's output, which has a correlated spectrum around the pump frequency, is down-converted by mixing with a local oscillator operating at the pump frequency with an adjustable phase. The down-converted signal at the mixer's output could be either amplified or deamplified, yielding noise squeezing, depending on the local oscillator phase.