Quantum metrology

A basic task of quantum metrology is estimating the parameter ${\displaystyle \theta }$ of the unitary dynamics

${\displaystyle \varrho (\theta )=\exp(-iH\theta )\varrho _{0},}$

where ${\displaystyle \varrho _{0}}$ is the initial state of the system and ${\displaystyle H}$ is the Hamiltonian of the system. ${\displaystyle \theta }$ is estimated based on measurements on ${\displaystyle \varrho (\theta ).}$

Typically, the system is composed of many particles, and the Hamiltonian is a sum of single-particle terms

${\displaystyle H=\sum _{k}H_{k},}$

where ${\displaystyle H_{k}}$ acts on the kth particle. In this case, there is no interaction between the particles, and we talk about linear interferometers.

The achievable precision is bounded from below by the quantum Cramér-Rao bound as

${\displaystyle (\Delta \theta )^{2}\geq {\frac {1}{F_{\rm {Q}}[\varrho ,H]}},}$

where ${\displaystyle F_{\rm {Q}}[\varrho ,H]}$ is the quantum Fisher information.[1][10]

One example of note is the use of the NOON state in a Mach–Zehnder interferometer to perform accurate phase measurements.[11] A similar effect can be produced using less exotic states such as squeezed states. In atomic ensembles, spin squeezed states can be used for phase measurements.

An important application of particular note is the detection of gravitational radiation with projects such as LIGO. Here high precision distance measurements must be made of two widely separated masses. However, currently the measurements described by quantum metrology are usually not used as they are very difficult to implement and there are many other sources of noise which prohibit the detection of gravitational waves which must be overcome first. Nevertheless, plans may call for the use of quantum metrology in LIGO.[12]

A central question of quantum metrology is how the precision, i.e., the variance of the parameter estimation, scales with the number of particles. Classical interferometers cannot overcome the shot-noise limit

${\displaystyle (\Delta \theta )^{2}\geq {\tfrac {1}{N}},}$

where is ${\displaystyle N}$ the number of particles. Quantum metrology can reach the Heisenberg limit given by

${\displaystyle (\Delta \theta )^{2}\geq {\tfrac {1}{N^{2}}}.}$

However, if uncorrelated local noise is present, then for large particle numbers the scaling of the precision returns to shot-noise scaling ${\displaystyle (\Delta \theta )^{2}\sim {\tfrac {1}{N}}.}$[13][14]

There are strong links between quantum metrology and quantum information science. It has been shown that quantum entanglement is needed to outperform classical interferometry in magnetrometry with a fully polarized ensemble of spins.[15] It has been proved that a similar relation is generally valid for any linear interferometer, independent of the details of the scheme.[16] Moreover, higher and higher levels of multipartite entanglement is needed to achieve a better and better accuracy in parameter estimation.[17][18]