Vacuum amplification across a programmable bosonic Bogoliubov stability boundary in a trapped-ion chain

arXiv:2610.41033v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A quantum oscillator always carries vacuum fluctuations, and modulating its parameters converts them into correlated pairs of real quanta. This vacuum amplification underlies squeezed light and Hawking radiation. In a closed quadratic system, pair creation competes with the energy splitting of the modes, and growth turns exponential only once pairing overcomes the splitting. Here we realize this competition in two motional modes of a trapped-ion chain. A two-mode-squeezing drive creates the pairs, and a beam-splitter coupling splits the motion into two coupled modes at different frequencies. The two rates are tuned and calibrated independently. Starting near the motional ground state, we cross the stability boundary in two ways.