Preparation of conditionally-squeezed states in qubit-oscillator systems

Inspired by recent advances in the manipulation of superconducting circuits coupled to mechanical modes in the quantum regime, we propose a protocol for generating superpositions of orthogonally squeezed states in a quantum harmonic oscillator. The protocol relies on a quadratic coupling between the oscillator and a qubit, and is conceptually similar to methods used for preparing cat states in qubit-oscillator systems. We numerically evaluate the robustness of the state-preparation scheme in the presence of decoherence, considering environmental coupling for both the harmonic oscillator and the qubit. As a potential application, we introduce a quantum error-correcting code based on conditionally-squeezed states and analyze its error-mitigation properties.