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Quantum fluctuations of the electromagnetic vacuum produce measurable physical effects such as Casimir forces and the Lamb shift. They also impose an observable limit—known as the quantum backaction limit—on the lowest temperatures that can be reached using conventional laser cooling techniques. As laser cooling experiments continue to bring massive mechanical systems to unprecedentedly low temperatures, this seemingly fundamental limit is increasingly important in the laboratory. Fortunately, vacuum fluctuations are not immutable and can be ‘squeezed’, reducing amplitude fluctuations at the expense of phase fluctuations. Here we propose and experimentally demonstrate that squeezed light can be used to cool the motion of a macroscopic mechanical object below the quantum backaction limit. We first cool a microwave cavity optomechanical system using a coherent state of light to within 15 per cent of this limit. We then cool the system to more than two decibels below the quantum backaction limit using a squeezed microwave field generated by a Josephson parametric amplifier. From heterodyne spectroscopy of the mechanical sidebands, we measure a minimum thermal occupancy of 0.19 ± 0.01 phonons. With our technique, even low-frequency mechanical oscillators can in principle be cooled arbitrarily close to the motional ground state, enabling the exploration of quantum physics in larger, more massive systems.

In quantum-enhanced sensing, non-classical states are used to improve the sensitivity of a measurement. Squeezed light, in particular, has proved a useful resource in enhanced mechanical displacement sensing, although the fundamental limit to this enhancement due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle has not been encountered experimentally. Here we use a microwave cavity optomechanical system to observe the squeezing-dependent radiation pressure noise that necessarily accompanies any quantum enhancement of the measurement precision and ultimately limits the measurement noise performance. By increasing the measurement strength so that radiation pressure forces dominate the thermal motion of the mechanical oscillator, we exploit the optomechanical interaction to implement an efficient quantum nondemolition measurement of the squeezed light. Thus, our results show how the mechanical oscillator improves the measurement of non-classical light, just as non-classical light enhances the measurement of the motion.