Quantum sensing is inevitably an elegant example of the supremacy of quantum technologies over their classical counterparts. One of the desired endeavors of quantum metrology is AC field sensing. Here, by means of analytical and numerical analysis, we show that integrable many-body systems can be exploited efficiently for detecting the amplitude of an AC field. Unlike the conventional strategies in using the ground states in critical many-body probes for parameter estimation, we only consider partial access to a subsystem. Due to the periodicity of the dynamics, any local block of the system saturates to a steady state which allows achieving sensing precision well beyond the classical limit, almost reaching the Heisenberg bound. We associate the enhanced quantum precision to closing of the Floquet gap, resembling the features of quantum sensing in the ground state of critical systems. We show that the proposed protocol can also be realized in near-term quantum simulators, e.g. ion-traps, with a limited number of qubits. We show that in such systems a simple block magnetization measurement and a Bayesian inference estimator can achieve very high precision AC field sensing.
Quantum sensing is inevitably an elegant example of the supremacy of quantum technologies over their classical counterparts. One of the desired endeavors of quantum metrology is AC field sensing. Here, by means of analytical and numerical analysis, we show that integrable many-body systems can be exploited efficiently for detecting the amplitude of an AC field. Unlike the conventional strategies in using the ground states in critical many-body probes for parameter estimation, we only consider partial access to a subsystem. Due to the periodicity of the dynamics, any local block of the system saturates to a steady state which allows achieving sensing precision well beyond the classical limit, almost reaching the Heisenberg bound. We associate the enhanced quantum precision to closing of the Floquet gap, resembling the features of quantum sensing in the ground state of critical systems. We show that the proposed protocol can also be realized in near-term quantum simulators, e.g. ion-traps, with a limited number of qubits. We show that in such systems a simple block magnetization measurement and a Bayesian inference estimator can achieve very high precision AC field sensing.
The ground-state criticality of many-body systems is a resource for quantum-enhanced sensing, namely, the Heisenberg precision limit, provided that one has access to the whole system. We show that, for partial accessibility, the sensing capabilities of a block of spins in the ground state reduces to the sub-Heisenberg limit. To compensate for this, we drive the Hamiltonian periodically and use a local steady state for quantum sensing. Remarkably, the steady-state sensing shows a significant enhancement in precision compared to the ground state and even achieves super-Heisenberg scaling for low frequencies. The origin of this precision enhancement is related to the closing of the Floquet quasienergy gap. It is in close correspondence with the vanishing of the energy gap at criticality for ground-state sensing with global accessibility. The proposal is general to all the integrable models and can be implemented on existing quantum devices.
Quantum sensors have been shown to be superior to their classical counterparts in terms of resource efficiency. Such sensors have traditionally used the time evolution of special forms of initially entangled states, adaptive measurement basis change, or the ground state of many-body systems tuned to criticality. Here, we propose a different way of doing quantum sensing which exploits the dynamics of a many-body system, initialized in a product state, along with a sequence of projective measurements in a specific basis. The procedure has multiple practical advantages as it: (i) enables remote quantum sensing, protecting a sample from the potentially invasive readout apparatus; and (ii) simplifies initialization by avoiding complex entangled or critical ground states. From a fundamental perspective, it harnesses a resource so far unexploited for sensing, namely, the residual information from the unobserved part of the many-body system after the wave-function collapses accompanying the measurements. By increasing the number of measurement sequences, through the means of a Bayesian estimator, precision beyond the standard limit, approaching the Heisenberg bound, is shown to be achievable.
Entangled quantum many-body systems can be used as sensors that enable the estimation of parameters with a precision larger than that achievable with ensembles of individual quantum detectors. Typically, the parameter estimation strategy requires the microscopic modelling of the quantum many-body system, as well as a an accurate description of its dynamics. This entails a complexity that can hinder the applicability of Bayesian inference techniques. In this work we show how to circumvent these issues by using neural networks that faithfully reproduce the dynamics of quantum many-body sensors, thus allowing for an efficient Bayesian analysis. We exemplify with an XXZ model driven by magnetic fields, and show that our method is capable to yield an estimation of field parameters beyond the standard quantum limit scaling. Our work paves the way for the practical use of quantum many-body systems as black-box sensors exploiting quantum resources to improve precision estimation.
Quantum sensing is one of the key areas that exemplify the superiority of quantum technologies. Nonetheless, most quantum sensing protocols operate efficiently only when the unknown parameters vary within a very narrow region, i.e., local sensing. Here, we provide a systematic formulation for quantifying the precision of a probe for multiparameter global sensing when there is no prior information about the parameters. In many-body probes, in which extra tunable parameters exist, our protocol can tune the performance for harnessing the quantum criticality over arbitrarily large sensing intervals. For the single-parameter sensing, our protocol optimizes a control field such that an Ising probe is tuned to always operate around its criticality. This significantly enhances the performance of the probe even when the interval of interest is so large that the precision is bounded by the standard limit. For the multiparameter case, our protocol optimizes the control fields such that the probe operates at the most efficient point along its critical line. Finally, it is shown that even a simple magnetization measurement significantly benefits from our global sensing protocol.
We investigate the physical requirements to reach the ultimate limits of ground-state metrology -- i.e., the estimation of an unknown parameter θ of an N-body Hamiltonian via measurements on its ground state -- using many-body probes featuring either short-range or long-range interactions. We characterize the conditions to saturate two fundamental limits of the quantum Fisher information Fθ: the static ground-state bound Fθ≲N2/Δ2, where Δ is the spectral gap, and the dynamical Heisenberg limit Fθ≲N2τ2, where τ is the total protocol duration. To saturate the static limit, we argue that short-range interacting systems require a spectral gap that closes with N. At second-order quantum critical points this leads to a universal condition on the critical exponents, ν(d+z)=1, which can be approached arbitrarily closely, as we show for the XXZ chain; cat-like ground states at first-order transitions provide an alternative route to static optimality. In contrast, we find that all-to-all interacting models can achieve optimality even in gapped regimes. Furthermore, reaching the dynamical bound is tightly related to the ground-state preparation time; we demonstrate that its optimal, inverse-gap profile can be obtained via local adiabatic protocols. By analyzing paradigmatic systems -- the transverse-field Ising chain, the XXZ chain, a squeezing Hamiltonian, and the two-mode Bose-Hubbard model -- we identify specific many-body probes capable of approaching both limits. Overall, our results provide a theoretical basis for the design of (local) many-body ground-state sensors operating at the ultimate limits of quantum precision.
Quantum sensors outperform their classical counterparts in their estimation precision, given the same amount of resources. So far, quantum-enhanced sensitivity has been achieved by exploiting the superposition principle. This enhancement has been obtained for particular forms of entangled states, adaptive measurement basis change, critical many-body systems, and steady state of periodically driven systems. Here, we introduce a different approach to obtain quantum-enhanced sensitivity in a many-body probe through utilizing the nature of quantum measurement and its subsequent wave function collapse without demanding prior entanglement. Our protocol consists of a sequence of local measurements, without reinitialization, performed regularly during the evolution of a many-body probe. As the number of sequences increases, the sensing precision is enhanced beyond the standard limit, reaching the Heisenberg bound asymptotically. The benefits of the protocol are multifold as it uses a product initial state and avoids complex initialization (e.g., prior entangled states or critical ground states) and allows for remote quantum sensing.