Polariton-generated intensity squeezing in semiconductor micropillars. T. Boulier, M. Bamba, A. Amo, C. Adrados, A. Lemaître, E. Galopin, I. Sagnes, J. Bloch, C. Ciuti, E. Giacobino and A. Bramati in Nature Comm. 5:3260 (2014).  What the paper says!?

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This work reports large polariton squeezing of up to 20.3%. This upgrades on previous reports of ≈4% by confining polaritons in a pillar.

They describe polariton interactions as «giant polariton nonlinearities», but justify it as requiring pumping power «two orders of magnitudes lower than in previous experiments» (in semiconductors).

Comments on the previous (pioneering) report:

Indeed, quadrature squeezing of about 4% was observed in a planar semiconductor microcavity, by using degenerate polariton four-wave mixing in 2004 (ref. 11). Despite several attempts with specifically designed planar microcavity samples, significant improvements of this first result were prevented by the excess noise coming from the intrinsic multimode nature of the emission in a planar microcavity, which is characterized by a continuum of polariton modes and is favourable to the coupling with lattice phonons.

Their theoretical model (in methods):