We demonstrate that a many-body nonlocality is a resource for ultra-precise metrology. This result is achieved by linking the sensitivity of a quantum sensor with a combination of many-body correlation functions that witness the nonlocality. We illustrate our findings with some prominent examples---a collection of spins forming an Ising chain and a gas of ultra-cold atoms in any two-mode configuration.
Quantum approaches relying on entangled photons have been recently proposed to increase the efficiency of optical measurements. We demonstrate here that, surprisingly, the use of classical light with entangled degrees of freedom can also bring outstanding advantages over conventional measurements in polarization metrology. Specifically, we show that radially polarized beams of light allow to perform real-time single-shot Mueller matrix polarimetry. Our results also indicate that quantum optical procedures requiring entanglement without nonlocality can be actually achieved in classical optics r…
I consider the role of detection noise in quantum-enhanced metrology in collective spin systems, and derive a fundamental bound for the maximum obtainable sensitivity for a given level of added detection noise. I then present an interaction-based readout utilising the commonly used one-axis twisting scheme that approaches this bound for states generated via several commonly considered methods of generating quantum enhancement, such as one-axis twisting, two-axis counter-twisting, twist-and-turn squeezing, quantum non-demolition measurements, and adiabatically scanning through a quantum phase t…
We consider Bell tests involving bipartite states shared between three parties. We show that the simple inclusion of a third part may greatly simplify the measurement scenario (in terms of the number of measurement settings per part) and allows the identification of previously unknown nonlocal resources.
Quantum steering is an important correlation in quantum information theory. A recent work [Nat. Commun. 12, 2410 (2021)] showed that quantum steering is also useful for quantum metrology. Here, we extend the exploration of steering-enhanced quantum metrology from single noiseless phase shifts to superpositions of noisy phase shifts. As concrete examples, we consider a control system that manipulates a target system to pass through a superposition of either dephased or depolarized phase shifts channels. We show that using such superpositions of noisy phase shifts can suppress the effects of noi…
We provide efficient and intuitive tools for deriving bounds on achievable precision in quantum enhanced metrology based on the geometry of quantum channels and semi-definite programming. We show that when decoherence is taken into account, the maximal possible quantum enhancement amounts generically to a constant factor rather than quadratic improvement. We apply these tools to derive bounds for models of decoherence relevant for metrological applications including: dephasing,depolarization, spontaneous emission and photon loss.
Quantum metrology overcomes standard precision limits and plays a central role in science and technology. Practically it is vulnerable to imperfections such as decoherence. Here, we demonstrate quantum metrology for noisy channels such that entanglement with ancillary qubits enhances the quantum Fisher information for phase estimation but not otherwise. Our photonic experiment covers a range of noise for various types of channels, including for two randomly alternating channels such that assisted entanglement fails for each noisy channel individually. We have simulated noisy channels by implem…
Quantum metrology is supposed to significantly improve the precision of parameter estimation by utilizing suitable quantum resources. However, the predicted precision can be severely distorted by realistic noises. Here, we propose a control-enhanced quantum metrology scheme to defend against these noises for improving the metrology performance. Our scheme can automatically alter the parameter encoding dynamics with adjustable controls, thus leading to optimal resultant states that are less sensitive to the noises under consideration. As a demonstration, we numerically apply it to the problem o…
Energy-time entangled biphoton source plays a great role in quantum communication, quantum metrology and quantum cryptography due to its strong temporal correlation and capability of nonlocal dispersion cancellation. As a quantum effect, nonlocal dispersion cancellation is further proposed as an alternative way for nonlocality test of continuous variable entanglement via the violation of Bell-like inequality proposed by Wasak et al. [Phys. Rev. A, 82, 052120 (2010)]. However, to date there is no experimental report either on the inequality violation or on a nonlocal detection with single-photo…
We propose and analyze a new approach based on parity-time ($\mathcal{PT}$) symmetric microcavities with balanced gain and loss to enhance the performance of cavity-assisted metrology. We identify the conditions under which $\mathcal{PT}$-symmetric microcavities allow to improve sensitivity beyond what is achievable in loss-only systems. We discuss its application to the detection of mechanical motion, and show that the sensitivity is significantly enhanced in the vicinity of the transition point from unbroken- to broken-$\mathcal{PT}$ regimes. We believe that our results open a new direction …
We show that when a suitable entanglement generating unitary operator depending on a parameter is applied on N qubits in parallel, and an appropriate observable is measured, a precision of order 2 raised to the power (-N) in estimating the parameter may be achieved. This exponentially improves the precision achievable in classical and in quantum non-entangling parallel strategies. We propose a quantum-optics model of laser light interacting with an N-qubit system, say a polyatomic molecule, via a generalized Jaynes-Cummings interaction which, in principle, could achieve the exponentially enhan…
We introduce the concept of entanglement enhanced interferometry from the viewpoint of the detected photons. The standard quantum limit is achieved when sequentially detected photons are assumed to be in an uncorrelated product state. However when we access the correlations between the detected photons that existed before the interferometer it becomes clear that entanglement enhanced measurement beyond the quantum limit could be achieved independent of loss. We describe possible realisations of this post-measurement entanglement detection using a small array of spin photon entangling gates. We…
The spectral properties of an interacting many-body system may display critical character and have potential applications in precision metrology. Here, we demonstrate such many-body enhanced metrology for microwave (MW) electric fields in a non-equilibrium Rydberg atomic gas. Near criticality the high sensitivity of Rydberg atoms to external MW electric fields, combined with many-body enhancement induces significant changes in the optical transmission. We quantify this behavior using the Fisher information. For continuous optical transmission at the critical point, the Fisher information is th…
In quantum metrology, one typically creates correlations among atoms or photons to enhance measurement precision. Here, we show how one can use other excitations to perform quantum-enhanced measurements on the example of center-of-mass excitations of a spin-orbit coupled Bose-Einstein condensate and a Coulomb crystal. We also present a method to simulate a homodyne detection of center-of-mass excitations in these systems, which is required for optimal estimation.
Quantum metrology plays a fundamental role in many scientific areas. However, the complexity of engineering entangled probes and the external noise raise technological barriers for realizing the expected precision of the to-be-estimated parameter with given resources. Here, we address this problem by introducing adjustable controls into the encoding process and then utilizing a hybrid quantum-classical approach to automatically optimize the controls online. Our scheme does not require any complex or intractable off-line design, and it can inherently correct certain unitary errors during the le…
There are a number of different strategies to measure the phase shift between two pathways of light more efficiently than suggested by the standard quantum limit. One way is to use highly entangled photons. Another way is to expose photons to a non-linear or interacting Hamiltonian. This paper emphasises that the conditional dynamics of open quantum systems provides an interesting additional tool for quantum-enhanced metrology. As a concrete example, we review a recent scheme which exploits the conditional dynamics of a laser-driven optical cavity with spontaneous photon emission inside a quan…
In this paper, we use the non-linear dynamics of the individual quantum trajectories of an optical cavity inside an instantaneous quantum feedback loop to measure the phase shift between two pathways of light with an accuracy above the standard quantum limit. The feedback laser provides a reference frame and constantly increases the dependence of the state of the resonator on the unknown phase. Since our quantum metrology scheme can be implemented with current technology and does not require highly-efficient single photon detectors, it should be of practical interest until highly-entangled man…
The estimation of physical parameters with Heisenberg sensitivity and beyond is one of the crucial problems for current quantum metrology. However, unavoidable lossy effect is commonly believed to be the main obstacle when applying fragile quantum states. To utilize the lossy quantum metrology, we offer an interferometric procedure for phase parameters estimation at the Heisenberg (up to 1/N) and super-Heisenberg (up to 1/N^3) scaling levels in the framework of the linear and nonlinear metrology approaches, respectively. The heart of our setup is the novel soliton Josephson Junction (SJJ) syst…
These notes summarize lectures given at the 2019 Les Houches summer school on Quantum Information Machines. They describe and review an application of quantum metrology concepts to searches for ultralight dark matter. In particular, for ultralight dark matter that couples as a weak classical force to a laboratory harmonic oscillator, quantum squeezing benefits experiments in which the mass of the dark matter particle is unknown. This benefit is present even if the oscillatory dark matter signal is much more coherent than the harmonic oscillator that it couples to, as is the case for microwave …
We propose a quantum metrology scheme in a cavity QED setup to achieve the Heisenberg limit. In our scheme, a series of identical two-level atoms randomly pass through and interact with a dissipative single-mode cavity. Different from the entanglement based Heisenberg limit metrology scheme, we do not need to prepare the atomic entangled states before they enter into the cavity. We show that the initial atomic coherence will induce an effective driving to the cavity field, whose steady state is an incoherent superposition of orthogonal states, with the superposition probabilities being depende…
Quantum-enhanced metrology aims to estimate an unknown parameter such that the precision scales better than the shot-noise bound. Single-shot adaptive quantum-enhanced metrology (AQEM) is a promising approach that uses feedback to tweak the quantum process according to previous measurement outcomes. Techniques and formalism for the adaptive case are quite different from the usual non-adaptive quantum metrology approach due to the causal relationship between measurements and outcomes. We construct a formal framework for AQEM by modeling the procedure as a decision-making process, and we derive …
We use multi-pulse dynamical decoupling to increase the coherence lifetime (T2) of large numbers of nitrogen-vacancy (NV) electronic spins in room temperature diamond, thus enabling scalable applications of multi-spin quantum information processing and metrology. We realize an order-of-magnitude extension of the NV multi-spin T2 for diamond samples with widely differing spin environments. For samples with nitrogen impurity concentration <~1 ppm, we find T2 > 2 ms, comparable to the longest coherence time reported for single NV centers, and demonstrate a ten-fold enhancement in NV multi-spin se…
Homogenization proposed in [Y.-C Wu and M. Żukowski, Phys. Rev. A 85, 022119 (2012)] is a procedure to transform a tight Bell inequality with partial correlations into a full-correlation form that is also tight. In this paper, we check the homogenizations of two families of $n$-partite Bell inequalities: the Hardy inequality and the tight Bell inequality without quantum violation. For Hardy's inequalities, their homogenizations bear stronger quantum violation for the maximally entangled state; the tight Bell inequalities without quantum violation give the boundary of quantum and supra-quantum,…
Ramsey interferometry is routinely used in quantum metrology for the most sensitive measurements of optical clock frequencies. Spontaneous decay to the electromagnetic vacuum ultimately limits the interrogation time and thus sets a lower bound to the optimal frequency sensitivity. In dense ensembles of two-level systems the presence of collective effects such as superradiance and dipole-dipole interaction tends to decrease the sensitivity even further. We show that by a redesign of the Ramsey-pulse sequence to include different rotations of individual spins that effectively fold the collective…
The main obstacle for practical quantum technology is the noise, which can induce the decoherence and destroy the potential quantum advantages. The fluctuation of a field, which induces the dephasing of the system, is one of the most common noises and widely regarded as detrimental to quantum technologies. Here we show, contrary to the conventional belief, the fluctuation can be used to improve the precision limits in quantum metrology for the estimation of various parameters. Specifically, we show that for the estimation of the direction and rotating frequency of a field, the achieved precisi…
This is a tutorial aimed at illustrating some recent developments in quantum parameter estimation beyond the Cramèr-Rao bound, as well as their applications in quantum metrology. Our starting point is the observation that there are situations in classical and quantum metrology where the unknown parameter of interest, besides determining the state of the probe, is also influencing the operation of the measuring devices, e.g. the range of possible outcomes. In those cases, non-regular statistical models may appear, for which the Cramèr-Rao theorem does not hold. In turn, the achievable precision…
We explore the quantum metrology in an optical molecular system coupled to two environments with different temperatures, using a quantum master equation beyond secular approximation. We discover that the steady-state coherence originating from and sustained by the nonequilibrium condition can enhance quantum metrology. We also study the quantitative measures of the nonequilibrium condition in terms of the curl flux, heat current and entropy production at the steady state. They are found to grow with temperature difference. However, an apparent paradox arises considering the contrary behaviors …
Nitrogen-vacancy ensembles promise an unprecedented combination of sensitivity and resolution for magnetic field sensing under ambient conditions. However, their full sensing potential is limited by the inhomogeneous degradation of their collective coherence, while dynamical-decoupling limits sensing to the detection of AC-fields. Here we propose using the recently demonstrated cavity-protection effect for room-temperature, ensemble-based DC metrology. We identify a parameter space where strong-coupling can persist at room temperature and where the dressed states are limited solely by the deph…
We present a general framework to study the simultaneous estimation of multiple phases in the presence of noise as a discretized model for phase imaging. This approach can lead to nontrivial bounds of the precision for multiphase estimation. Our results show that simultaneous estimation (SE) of multiple phases is always better than individual estimation (IE) of each phase even in noisy environment. However with $d$ being the number of phases, the $O(d)$ advantage in the variance of the estimation, with which SE outperforms IE schemes for noiseless processes, may disappear asymptotically. When …
Hypergraph states form a family of multiparticle quantum states that generalizes the well-known concept of Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states, cluster states, and more broadly graph states. We study the nonlocal properties of quantum hypergraph states. We demonstrate that the correlations in hypergraph states can be used to derive various types of nonlocality proofs, including Hardy-type arguments and Bell inequalities for genuine multiparticle nonlocality. Moreover, we show that hypergraph states allow for an exponentially increasing violation of local realism which is robust against loss of …
Preparing highly entangled quantum states between remote parties is a major challenge for quantum communications [1-8]. Particularly promising in this context are the N00N states, which are entangled N-photon wavepackets delocalized between two different locations, providing measurement sensitivity limited only by the uncertainty principle [1, 10-15]. However, these states are notoriously vulnerable to losses, making it difficult both to share them between remote locations, and to recombine them to exploit interference effects. Here we address this challenge by utilizing the reverse version of…
In open quantum systems, the precision of metrology inevitably suffers from the noise. {In Markovian open quantum dynamics, the precision can not be improved by using entangled probes although the measurement time is effectively shortened.} However, it was predicted over one decade ago that in a non-Markovian one, the error can be significantly reduced by the quantum Zeno effect (QZE) [Chin, Huelga, and Plenio, Phys. Rev. Lett. \textbf{109}, 233601 (2012)]. In this work, we apply a recently-developed quantum simulation approach to experimentally verify that entangled probes can improve the pre…
Entangled states of rotating, trapped ultracold bosons form a very promising scenario for quantum metrology. In order to employ such states for metrology, it is vital to understand their detailed form and the enhanced accuracy with which they could measure phase, in this case generated through rotation. In this work we study the rotation of ultracold bosons in an asymmetric trapping potential beyond the lowest Landau level (LLL) approximation. We demonstrate that whilst the LLL can identify reasonably the critical frequency for a quantum phase transition and entangled state generation, it is v…
We analyze the performance of a generalized Kitaev's phase estimation algorithm where N phase gates, acting on $M$ qubits prepared in a product state, may be distributed in an arbitrary way. Unlike the standard algorithm, where the mean square error scales as 1/N, the optimal generalizations offer the Heisenberg $1/N^2$ error scaling and we show that they are in fact very close to the fundamental Bayesian estimation bound. We also demonstrate that the optimality of the algorithm breaks down when losses are taken into account, in which case the performance is inferior to the optimal entanglemen…
In this paper, we use Bell inequality and nonlocality to study the bipartite correlation in an exactly soluble two-dimensional mixed spin system. Bell inequality turns out to be a valuable detector for phase transitions in this model. It can detect not only the quantum phase transition, but also the thermal phase transitions, of the system. The property of bipartite correlation in the system is also analyzed. In the quantum anti-ferromagnetic phase, the Bell inequality is violated thus nonlocality is present. It is interesting that the nonlocality is enhanced by thermal fluctuation, and simila…
We study how conditional photon operations can affect multipartite quantum correlations, specifically nonlocality and entanglement, of the continuous variable GHZ states. We find that the violation of the Mermin-Klyshko inequality revealing the multipartite nonlocality can be made stronger with photon subtraction applied on each mode of the original GHZ states, particularly in a weak squeezing regime. Photon addition applied on local modes also turns out to enhance the degree of multipartite nonlocality in a broad range of parameters. We further investigate the effects of the photon operations…
