Deterministic Squeezed States with Collective Measurements and Feedback

We demonstrate the creation of entangled, spin-squeezed states using a collective, or joint, measurement and real-time feedback. The pseudospin state of an ensemble of N=5×104 laser-cooled Rb87 atoms is deterministically driven to a specified population state with angular resolution that is a factor of 5.5(8) [7.4(6) dB] in variance below the standard quantum limit for unentangled atoms—comparable to the best enhancements using only unitary evolution. Without feedback, conditioning on the outcome of the joint premeasurement, we directly observe up to 59(8) times [17.7(6) dB] improvement in quantum phase variance relative to the standard quantum limit for N=4×105 atoms. This is one of the largest reported entanglement enhancements to date in any system.