  Physical systems usually exhibit quantum behavior, such as superpositions and
entanglement, only when they are sufficiently decoupled from a lossy
environment. Paradoxically, a specially engineered interaction with the
environment can become a resource for the generation and protection of quantum
states. This notion can be generalized to the confinement of a system into a
manifold of quantum states, consisting of all coherent superpositions of
multiple stable steady states. We have experimentally confined the state of a
harmonic oscillator to the quantum manifold spanned by two coherent states of
opposite phases. In particular, we have observed a Schrodinger cat state
spontaneously squeeze out of vacuum, before decaying into a classical mixture.
This was accomplished by designing a superconducting microwave resonator whose
coupling to a cold bath is dominated by photon pair exchange. This experiment
opens new avenues in the fields of nonlinear quantum optics and quantum
information, where systems with multi-dimensional steady state manifolds can be
used as error corrected logical qubits.
