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arXiv:2301.05910 · AVS Quantum Science

Measurement operator for quantum nondemolition measurements

Ebubechukwu O. Ilo-Okeke, Ping Chen, Shuang Li, B.C. Anusionwu, Valentin Ivannikov, Tim Byrnes

Published May 12, 2023• 4 citations
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Abstract

We derive a measurement operator corresponding to a quantum nondemolition (QND) measurement of an atomic ensemble. The quantum measurement operator takes the form of a positive operator valued measure (POVM) and is valid for arbitrary interaction times, initial coherent state amplitudes, and final photon measurement outcomes. We analyze the dependence on various parameters and show that the effect of the QND measurement for short interaction times is to apply a Gaussian modulation of the initial state wavefunction. We derive approximate expressions for the POVM in various limits, such as the short interaction time regime and projective measurement limit. Several examples are shown, which show how spin squeezing and Schrodinger cat states can be generated using the measurement.

DOI
10.1116/5.0141921

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AVS Quantum Science•Sep 1, 2023•3 citations
We derive a measurement operator corresponding to a quantum nondemolition (QND) measurement of an atomic ensemble. The quantum measurement operator takes the form of a positive operator valued measure (POVM) and is valid for arbitrary interaction times, initial coherent state amplitudes, and final photon measurement outcomes. We analyze the dependence on various parameters and show that the effect of the QND measurement for short interaction times is to apply a Gaussian modulation of the initial state wavefunction. We derive approximate expressions for the POVM in various limits, such as the short interaction time regime and projective measurement limit. Several examples are shown, which show how spin squeezing and Schrodinger cat states can be generated using the measurement.
We present a theory for quantum nondemolition (QND) measurements of an atomic ensemble in the presence of spontaneous emission. We derive the master equation that governs the evolution of the ground state of the atoms and the quantum state of light. Solving the master equation exactly without invoking the Holstein-Primakoff approximation and projecting out the quantum state of light, we derive a positive operator-valued measure that describes the QND measurement. We show that, at high spontaneous emission conditions, the QND measurement has a unique dominant state to which the measurement collapses. We additionally investigate the behavior of the QND measurement in the limiting case of strong atom-light interactions, where we show that the positive operator valued measure becomes a projection operator. We further analyze the effect of spontaneous emission noise on atomic state preparation. We find that it limits the width of the eigenvalue spectrum available to a quantum state in a linear superposition. This effect leads to state collapse on the dominant state. We generate various nonclassical states of the atom by tuning the atom-light interaction strength. We find that nonclassical states such as the Schr\"odinger-cat state, whose coherence spans the entire eigenvalue spectrum of the total spin operator Jz{J}_{z}Jz​ for a given spin eigenvalue JJJ, lose their coherence because spontaneous emission limits the accessibility of states farther away from the dominant state.
We develop a measurement operator formalism to handle quantum nondemolition (QND) measurement induced entanglement generation between two atomic gases. We first derive how the QND entangling scheme reduces to a positive operator valued measure (POVM), and consider its limiting case when it is a projection operator that collapses the state to a total spin projection state. We then analyze how a stroboscopic sequence of such projections made in the x and z basis evolves the initial wavefunction. We show that for this projection sequence there exists a unique basis where the state evolution can be simplified. This allows one to derive the exact state evolution in a highly efficient manner. Our formalism does not use the Holstein-Primakoff approximation as is conventionally done, and treats the spins of the atomic gases in an exact way.
We develop a measurement operator formalism to handle quantum nondemolition (QND) measurement induced entanglement generation between two atomic gases. We first derive how the QND entangling scheme reduces to a positive operator-valued measure, and consider its limiting case when it can be used to construct a projection operator that collapses the state to a total spin projection state. We then analyze how a stroboscopic sequence of such projections made in the xxx and zzz basis evolves the initial wave function. Such a sequence of QND projections can enhance the entanglement between the atomic ensembles and makes the state converge towards a highly entangled state. We show several mathematical identities which greatly simplify the state evolution in the projection sequence and allow one to derive the exact state in a highly efficient manner. Our formalism does not use the Holstein-Primakoff approximation as is conventionally done, and treats the spins of the atomic gases in an exact way.
Quantum measurement is performed by coupling a quantity A ^ of a system to a “meter” and reading the meter. In the regime of strong measurement, the possible outcomes and the final state are entirely defined by A ^ , with probabilities dictated by the initial state. In this work, we will be interested in the regime in which a strong self-Hamiltonian, and not the coupling, defines the measurement outcomes and the final state. In this regime, the expectation value of any arbitrary set of observables can be measured in a quantum nondemolition (QND) way without reset or repreparation of the state. We discuss applications that include single-shot measurement of the expectation value of all noncommuting observables from a single copy of the state, without any statistics or ensembles, and the decoding of dephasing errors in a Schrödinger-cat qubit quantum error-correction (QEC) code. In the latter, the error syndrome is obtained from single-shot QND measurements of the mean photon number of the cat, even if neither the cat code words nor the stabilizing Hamiltonian commute with the photon-number operator.
We theoretically describe the weak measurement of a two-level system (qubit) and quantify the degree to which such a qubit measurement has a quantum nondemolition (QND) character. The qubit is coupled to a harmonic oscillator, which undergoes a projective measurement. Information on the qubit state is extracted from the oscillator measurement outcomes, and the QND character of the measurement is inferred from the result of subsequent measurements of the oscillator. We use the positive operator valued measure (POVM) formalism to describe the qubit measurement. Two mechanisms lead to deviations from a perfect QND measurement: (i) the quantum fluctuations of the oscillator, and (ii) quantum tunneling between the qubit states ∣0⟩|0⟩∣0⟩ and ∣1⟩|1⟩∣1⟩ during measurements. Our theory can be applied to QND measurements performed on superconducting qubits coupled to a circuit oscillator.
We study the effects of optical and atomic decoherence in entangled atomic ensembles produced via quantum nondemolition (QND) measurements. We examine potentially experimentally detrimental effects, such as optical phase diffusion, photon loss and gain, and atomic dephasing. For the optical decoherence channels, we use the technique of integration within ordered operators to obtain the associated Kraus operators. We analyze the effect of different decoherence channels on various quantities, such as the variances of the spin operators, entanglement and correlation criteria, logarithmic negativity, and the Bell–CHSH inequality. We generally find a smooth decay of correlations and entanglement in the presence of decoherence. In the short interaction time range, we find that various quantities show signals consistent with, and showing that entanglement exists under all three types of decoherence. Our results show that QND measurements are one of the most promising methods for entanglement generation between two Bose–Einstein condensates.