Entanglement Growth via Splitting of a Few Thermal Quanta

Quanta splitting is an essential generator of Gaussian entanglement, exemplified by Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen states and apparently the most commonly occurring form of entanglement. In general, it results from the strong pumping of a nonlinear process with a highly coherent and low-noise external drive. In contrast, recent experiments involving efficient trilinear processes in trapped ions and superconducting circuits have opened the complementary possibility to test the splitting of a few thermal quanta. Stimulated by such small thermal energy, a strong degenerate trilinear coupling generates large amounts of nonclassicality, detectable by more than 3 dB of distillable quadrature squeezing. Substantial entanglement can be generated via frequent passive linear coupling to a third mode present in parallel with the trilinear coupling. This new form of entanglement, outside any Gaussian approximation, surprisingly grows with the mean number of split thermal quanta; a quality absent from Gaussian entanglement. Using distillable squeezing we shed light on this new entanglement mechanism for nonlinear bosonic systems.