Which general properties of entangled quantum states are relevant for quantum metrology? As well as showing that enhanced accuracy is not fundamentally related to nonlocality and distillability, the authors are able to demonstrate that tools from quantum metrology may serve as a powerful witness of entanglement.
Entanglement-enhanced quantum metrology explores the utilization of quantum entanglement to enhance measurement precision. When particles in a probe are prepared into a suitable quantum entangled state, they may collectively accumulate information about the physical quantity to be measured, leading to an improvement in measurement precision beyond the standard quantum limit and approaching the Heisenberg limit. The rapid advancement of techniques for quantum manipulation and detection has enabled the generation, manipulation, and detection of multi-particle entangled states in synthetic quantum systems such as cold atoms and trapped ions. This article aims to review and illustrate the fundamental principles and experimental progresses that demonstrate multi-particle entanglement for quantum metrology, as well as discuss the potential applications of entanglement-enhanced quantum sensors.
Armed with quantum correlations, quantum sensors in a network have shown the potential to outclass their classical counterparts in distributed sensing tasks such as clock synchronization and reference frame alignment. On the other hand, this analysis was done for simple and idealized networks, whereas the correlation shared within a practical quantum network, captured by the notion of network states, is much more complex. Here, we prove a general bound that limits the performance of using quantum network states to estimate a global parameter, establishing the necessity of genuine multipartite entanglement for achieving a quantum advantage. The bound can also serve as an entanglement witness in networks and can be generalized to states generated by shallow circuits. Moreover, while our bound prohibits local network states from achieving the Heisenberg limit, we design a probabilistic protocol that, once successful, attains this ultimate limit of quantum metrology and preserves the privacy of involved parties. Our work establishes both the limitation and the possibility of quantum metrology within quantum networks.
Quantum precision enhancement is of fundamental importance for the development of advanced metrological optical experiments, such as gravitational wave detection and frequency calibration with atomic clocks. Precision in these experiments is strongly limited by the 1/√N shot noise factor with N being the number of probes (photons, atoms) employed in the experiment. Quantum theory provides tools to overcome the bound by using entangled probes. In an idealized scenario this gives rise to the Heisenberg scaling of precision 1/N. Here we show that when decoherence is taken into account, the maximal possible quantum enhancement in the asymptotic limit of infinite N amounts generically to a constant factor rather than quadratic improvement. We provide efficient and intuitive tools for deriving the bounds based on the geometry of quantum channels and semi-definite programming. We apply these tools to derive bounds for models of decoherence relevant for metrological applications including: depolarization, dephasing, spontaneous emission and photon loss. Quantum metrology employs the properties of quantum states to further enhance the accuracy of some of the most precise measurement schemes to date. Here, a method for estimating the upper bounds to achievable precision in quantum-enhanced metrology protocols in the presence of decoherence is presented.
Entanglement is generally considered necessary for achieving the Heisenberg limit in quantum metrology. We construct analogues of Dicke and GHZ states on a single N+1 dimensional qudit that achieve precision equivalent to symmetrically entangled states on N qubits, showing that entanglement is not necessary for going beyond the standard quantum limit. We define a measure of non-classicality based on quantum Fisher information and estimate the achievable precision, suggesting a close relationship between non-classical states and metrological power of qudits. Our work offers an exponential reduction in the physical resources required for quantum-enhanced parameter estimation, making it accessible on any quantum system with a high-dimensional Hilbert space.
For the last 20 years, the question of what are the fundamental capabilities of quantum precision measurements has sparked a lively debate throughout the scientific community. Typically, the ultimate limits in quantum metrology are associated with the notion of the Heisenberg limit expressed in terms of the physical resources used in the measurement procedure. Over the years, a variety of different physical resources were introduced, leading to a confusion about the meaning of the Heisenberg limit. Here, we review the mainstream definitions of the relevant resources and introduce the universal resource count, that is, the expectation value of the generator (above its ground state) of translations in the parameter we wish to estimate, that applies to all measurement strategies. This leads to the ultimate formulation of the Heisenberg limit for quantum metrology. We prove that this limit holds for the generators of translations with an upper-bounded spectrum.
We summarise important recent advances in quantum metrology, in connection to experiments in cold gases, trapped cold atoms and photons. First we review simple metrological setups, such as quantum metrology with spin squeezed states, with Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states, Dicke states and singlet states. We calculate the highest precision achievable in these schemes. Then, we present the fundamental notions of quantum metrology, such as shot-noise scaling, Heisenberg scaling, the quantum Fisher information and the Cram´er-Rao bound. Using these, we demonstrate that entanglement is needed to surpass the shot-noise scaling in very general metrological tasks with a linear interferometer. We discuss some applications of the quantum Fisher information, such as how it can be used to obtain a criterion for a quantum state to be a macroscopic superposition. We show how it is related to the the speed of a quantum evolution, and how it appears in the theory of the quantum Zeno effect. Finally, we explain how uncorrelated noise limits the highest achievable precision in very general metrological tasks.