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arXiv:2408.15926 · Nature Communications

Beating the Ramsey limit on sensing with deterministic qubit control

Malida Hecht, Kumar Saurav, Evangelos Vlachos, Daniel A. Lidar, Eli M. Levenson-Falk

Published Apr 29, 2025• 4 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Abstract Quantum sensors promise revolutionary advances in medical imaging, energy production, mass detection, geodesy, foundational physics research, and a host of other fields. In many sensors, the signal takes the form of a changing qubit frequency, which is detected with a Ramsey interference measurement. Unfortunately, environmental noise decoheres the qubit state, reducing signal. Here we introduce a protocol for enhancing the sensitivity of a measurement of a qubit's frequency in the presence of decoherence. We use a continuous drive to stabilize one component of the qubit's Bloch vector, enhancing the effect of a small static frequency shift. We demonstrate our protocol on a superconducting qubit, enhancing sensitivity per measurement shot by 1.65x and sensitivity per qubit evolution time by 1.09x compared to standard Ramsey interferometry. We explore the protocol theoretically and numerically, finding maximum enhancements of 1.96x and 1.18x, respectively. We also show that the protocol is robust to parameter miscalibrations. Our protocol provides an unconditional enhancement in signal-to-noise ratio compared to standard Ramsey interferometry. It requires no feedback and no extra control or measurement resources, and can be immediately applied in a wide variety of quantum computing and quantum sensor technologies to enhance their sensitivities.

DOI
10.1038/s41467-025-58947-4

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Abstract Quantum sensors promise revolutionary advances in medical imaging, energy production, mass detection, geodesy, foundational physics research, and a host of other fields. In many sensors, the signal takes the form of a changing qubit frequency, which is detected with a Ramsey interference measurement. Unfortunately, environmental noise decoheres the qubit state, reducing signal. Here we introduce a protocol for enhancing the sensitivity of a measurement of a qubit's frequency in the presence of decoherence. We use a continuous drive to stabilize one component of the qubit's Bloch vector, enhancing the effect of a small static frequency shift. We demonstrate our protocol on a superconducting qubit, enhancing sensitivity per measurement shot by 1.65x and sensitivity per qubit evolution time by 1.09x compared to standard Ramsey interferometry. We explore the protocol theoretically and numerically, finding maximum enhancements of 1.96x and 1.18x, respectively. We also show that the protocol is robust to parameter miscalibrations. Our protocol provides an unconditional enhancement in signal-to-noise ratio compared to standard Ramsey interferometry. It requires no feedback and no extra control or measurement resources, and can be immediately applied in a wide variety of quantum computing and quantum sensor technologies to enhance their sensitivities.
Quantum sensing protocols that exploit the dephasing of a probe qubit are powerful and ubiquitous methods for interrogating an unknown environment. They have a variety of applications, ranging from noise mitigation in quantum processors, to the study of correlated electron states. Here, we discuss a simple strategy for enhancing these methods, based on the fact that they often give rise to an inadvertent quench of the probed system: there is an effective sudden change in the environmental Hamiltonian at the start of the sensing protocol. These quenches are extremely sensitive to the initial environmental state, and lead to observable changes in the sensor qubit evolution. We show how these new features give access to environmental response properties. This enables methods for direct measurement of bath temperature, and for detecting non-thermal equilibrium states. We also discuss how to deliberately control and modulate this quench physics, which enables reconstruction of the bath spectral function. Extensions to non-Gaussian quantum baths are also discussed, as is the application of our ideas to a range of sensing platforms (e.g., nitrogen-vacancy (NV) centers in diamond, semiconductor quantum dots, and superconducting circuits).
A measurement of a single-qubit quantum sensor reveals at most 1 bit of information about the signal that was sensed. To perform a classification task on the signal, the conventional approach is to repeat a sensing protocol many times, averaging the measurement results to obtain a high-precision estimate of the sensed signal, and then to apply classical postprocessing. Quantum computational sensing (QCS) is an alternative approach that breaks with the paradigm of first obtaining a classical estimate of the signal and then computing a function of the estimated signal in postprocessing. QCS instead combines quantum sensing with quantum computing to concentrate information about the signal relevant to the task into the solitary bit revealed by each measurement. Here, we report on the experimental demonstration of QCS where sensing and computing were both performed by the same single superconducting transmon qubit. We consider various binary classification tasks based on static and oscillating magnetic fields induced by current through a flux line. The fields were sensed through a double-junction superconducting quantum interference device (SQUID) loop that was part of the qubit. We used a protocol based on quantum signal processing to preprocess the sensed signals in the quantum domain prior to measurement. For tasks on static magnetic fields, our protocol outperformed the conventional baseline of Ramsey-based phase estimation by as much as 15 percentage points. For tasks on oscillating magnetic fields, we classified signal amplitude and frequency with up to 20 and 15 percentage points higher accuracy, respectively, compared to the conventional baseline of optimized dynamical-decoupling protocols. Our results illustrate how quantum computing can enhance quantum sensing even with a minimally sized quantum system subject to the practical limitations of decoherence and error-prone operations.
Quantum metrology based on superconducting qubits offers unprecedented precision in measuring fundamental physical quantities, particularly magnetic fields. In this study, we develop a modified quantum phase estimation algorithm utilizing superconducting qubits, enhanced by optimized initial state preparation, significantly improving measurement sensitivity and reducing estimation times compared to conventional techniques. To ensure practical applicability and robustness, we incorporate advanced noise modeling, including intrinsic decoherence effects such as flux-induced noise and Purcell losses. Through detailed analytical modeling and numerical simulations, we systematically evaluate sensitivity and practical implementation constraints across various superconducting qubit architectures—transmon, fluxonium, conventional flux, and C-shunt flux qubits. Our approach quantifies the critical trade-offs between coherence, measurement dynamics, and sensitivity, identifying optimal operational regimes for high-performance quantum sensing. We introduce custom circuit simulation methods enabling the analysis and optimization of arbitrary superconducting quantum devices. Our findings provide a framework for advancing quantum-enhanced magnetometry and promise to facilitate next-generation quantum sensors for fundamental physics research, gravitational field measurements, and quantum-assisted searches for dark matter candidates.
Quantum sensing promises measurement precision beyond classical limits, but its practical realization is often hindered by decoherence and the challenges of generating and stabilizing entanglement in large-scale systems. Here, we experimentally demonstrate a scalable, scrambling-enhanced quantum sensing protocol, referred to as butterfly metrology, implemented on a cross-shaped superconducting quantum processor. By harnessing quantum information scrambling, the protocol converts local interactions into delocalized metrologically useful correlations, enabling robust signal amplification through interference of the scrambled and polarized quantum states. We validate the time-reversal ability via Loschmidt echo measurements and quantify the information scrambling through out-of-time-ordered correlators, establishing the essential quantum resources of our protocol. Our measurements reveal that the sensing sensitivity surpasses the standard quantum limit (SQL) with increasing qubit number, reaching 3.78 in a 9-qubit configuration, compared to the SQL of 3.0. The scheme further exhibits inherent robustness to coherent control errors and probed signal noise. This work demonstrates a readily scalable path toward practical quantum sensing advantages with prevalent experimental platforms.
Quantum systems based on superconducting circuits with qubits with quantized energy levels serve as an efficient physical background for constructing different quantum devices, for instance, quantum sensors. The important class of such engineering devices belongs to the systems with quantum tunneling effects, like Josephson junctions, where the set of energy levels is influenced by the external fields. These fields change the phase properties of the measuring qubits, and, in this way, they can be detected. The weakly anharmonic oscillator is often referred as a transmon qubit. Such qubits are constructed with superconducting capacitor structures connected by Josephson junctions, they can be controlled by microwave pulses of a few nanoseconds. The quantum sensing mechanism studied here is based on coupling the measuring transmon superconducting qubits with magnetic materials. The sensing protocol of Ramsey Fringes interferometry covers several stages and demands high-quality control over the sensor coherence. Although the weakly nonlinear properties of transmons prevent the sensing procedure from the strong influence of external perturbations, nevertheless, the extension of the coherence time interval and minimization of the dephasing effects are still a matter of great importance. Here we discuss the improvement of the quantum sensor performance by the application of feedback control in the form of gradient descent algorithm over the dephasing factor-function.
Time-resolution protocol of quantum sensing aims to measure the fast temporal variation of an external field and demands a high field sensitivity in a short interrogation time $\ensuremath{\tau}$. Since any operation that evolves the quantum state takes time and is counted as part of the interrogation, evaluating the performance of the time-resolution protocol requires a complete end-to-end description of the measurement process. In particular, the initial state has to be one of the quantum sensor's eigenstates in the absence of external fields, and the final projective measurements must be performed in the same eigenstate basis. Building upon prior works which proposed limits for time-resolved sensing using a quantum sensor, we apply optimal control theory to optimize the time-resolution protocol. Our analysis indicates that there exists a critical interrogation time T∗{T}^{*}T∗: When $\ensuremath{\tau}<{T}^{*}$ the optimal protocol is a purely bang-bang strategy; when $\ensuremath{\tau}>{T}^{*}$ the optimal protocol involves a singular control during the interrogation. In the short-$\ensuremath{\tau}$ regime, which is relevant to high time resolution, we propose a detune protocol that involves only smooth control during the entire interrogation. As the discontinuities of control pose the main obstacles to experimental realization, we expect the presented detune protocol to be practically useful. In the long-$\ensuremath{\tau}$ regime, the optimal protocol closely resembles the Ramsey sequence; protocols based on maximizing quantum Fisher information are constructed to highlight the difference between the theoretically optimal and practically implementable measurements. Effective use of the time-resolution protocol requires a setup where the unknown time-domain signal of interest can be identically and repeatedly generated. As a potentially relevant application, we outline the calibration of baseband flux pulse distortion in the control of superconducting qubits.