Confining the state of light to a quantum manifold by engineered two-photon loss

Physical systems usually exhibit quantum behavior, such as superpositions and entanglement, only when they are sufficiently decoupled from a lossy environment. Paradoxically, a specially engineered interaction with the environment can become a resource for the generation and protection of quantum states.This notion can be generalized to the confinement of a system into a manifold of quantum states, consisting of all coherent superpositions of multiple stable steady states.We have confined the state of a superconducting resonator to the quantum manifold spanned by two coherent states of opposite phases and have observed a Schrödinger cat state spontaneously squeeze out of vacuum before decaying into a classical mixture.This experiment points toward robustly encoding quantum information inmultidimensional steady-state manifolds.