Frequency shifts heralding ground state squeezing and entanglement of two coupled harmonic oscillators

Abstract

It is often argued that two linearly coupled quantum harmonic oscillators, even when cooled to their ground state, display no inherently quantum features beyond quantized energy levels. Here, we challenge this view by showing that their classical observables encode genuinely quantum features. In particular, we demonstrate that the characteristic frequency shifts observed in coupled oscillators signal non-classical correlations and ground-state entanglement at zero temperature corresponding to two-mode squeezing between the uncoupled modes. From a complementary perspective, these two effects, frequency shifts and squeezing, represent the same underlying phenomenon but expressed in different mode bases. What appears as a spectral renormalization in one description manifests itself as entanglement in the other. Frequency shifts therefore constitute an entanglement witness accessible via standard spectroscopy. While the underlying squeezing is not directly measurable, it can be exploited to enhance the signal-to-noise ratio in precision frequency measurements of individual oscillators without requiring squeezed quantum noise. This uncovers a new route to quantum-enhanced sensing within systems traditionally regarded as classical, offering fresh insight into how signatures of quantumness persists across the quantum-to-classical boundary.