Magnon squeezing in an antiferromagnet: Reducing the spin noise below the standard quantum limit

We report the first experimental demonstration of quantum squeezing of a collective spin-wave excitation (magnon) using femtosecond optical pulses to generate correlations involving pairs of spins in an antiferromagnetic insulator MnF2. In the squeezed state, the fluctuations of the magnetization of a crystallographic unit cell vary periodically in time and are reduced below that of the ground-state quantum noise.