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arXiv:2507.06303 · Physical Review A

Extracting filtered signal statistics of continuously measured quantum systems

Anthony Kiely, Gabriel Teixeira Landi

Published Mar 9, 2026• 1 citation
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Abstract

The joint state of a continuously monitored quantum system and the classical filtered measurement record has recently been shown to be described by a quantum Fokker-Planck master equation []. We present a deterministic approach to compute the steady state of the system and detector. The method is shown to become particularly efficient in the absence of feedback, which we exploit to develop a perturbative approach valid for weak feedback. We show that through this method we can extract the full counting statistics of the signal, the quantum-classical mutual information between the system and signal, and the Fisher information of the signal, which can be used for sensing applications. Our results are illustrated with both single-qubit models and the spin chains governed by the one-dimensional transverse field Ising model or the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model.

DOI
10.1103/yxqg-93jz

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The joint state of a continuously monitored quantum system and the classical filtered measurement record has recently been shown to be described by a quantum Fokker-Planck master equation []. We present a deterministic approach to compute the steady state of the system and detector. The method is shown to become particularly efficient in the absence of feedback, which we exploit to develop a perturbative approach valid for weak feedback. We show that through this method we can extract the full counting statistics of the signal, the quantum-classical mutual information between the system and signal, and the Fisher information of the signal, which can be used for sensing applications. Our results are illustrated with both single-qubit models and the spin chains governed by the one-dimensional transverse field Ising model or the Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick model.
Measurement and feedback control are essential features of quantum science, with applications ranging from quantum technology protocols to information-to-work conversion in quantum thermodynamics. Theoretical descriptions of feedback control are typically given in terms of stochastic equations requiring numerical solutions, or are limited to linear feedback protocols. Here we present a formalism for continuous quantum measurement and feedback, both linear and nonlinear. Our main result is a quantum Fokker-Planck master equation describing the joint dynamics of a quantum system and a detector with finite bandwidth. For fast measurements, we derive a Markovian master equation for the system alone, amenable to analytical treatment. We illustrate our formalism by investigating two basic information engines, one quantum and one classical.
In this work, we consider a general feedback protocol based on quantum-jump detections, where the last detected jump channel is stored in a memory and subsequently used to implement a feedback action, such as modifying the system Hamiltonian conditioned on the last jump. We show that the time evolution of this general protocol can be described by a Lindblad master equation defined in a hybrid classical-quantum space, where the classical part encodes the stored measurement record (memory) and the quantum part represents the monitored system. Moreover, we show that this new representation can be used to fully characterize the counting statistics of a system subject to a general jump-based feedback protocol. We apply the formalism to a three-level system coupled to two thermal baths operating as a thermal machine, and we show that jump-based feedback can be used to convert the information obtained from the jump detections into work. Our framework provides analytical tools that enable the characterization of key statistical properties of any counting observable under jump-based feedback, such as the average current, noise, correlation functions, and power spectrum.
In this paper, we derive a general master equation for continuous feedback based on arbitrary linear signals. This result is an extension of the Quantum Fokker-Planck Master Equation derived by Annby-Andersson et al (Phys. Rev. Lett. 129, 050401) to the case where the experiment has a general filtering structure. The filtering operation can include delayed information, memory effects, and non-Markovian signal processing. Using this general master equation, we derive analytical results for the ground state cooling of a quantum harmonic oscillator. We compared our results with those derived by De Sousa et al (Phys. Rev. E 111, 014152). Our framework aims to capture more realistic situations, to allow experiments to be better modeled, and to study non-Markovian effects in the spectral properties of the measurement signal.
We address the peculiarities of the quantum measurement process in the course of a continuous weak linear measurement (CWLM). As a tool, we implement an efficient numerical simulation scheme that allows us to generate single quantum trajectories of the measured system state as well as the recorded detector signal, and study statistics of these trajectories with and without post-selection. In this scheme, a linear detector is modelled with a qubit that is weakly coupled to the quantum system measured and is subject to projective measurement and re-initialization after a time interval at each simulation step. We explain the conditions under which the scheme provides an accurate description of CWLM. We restrict ourselves to a qubit non-demolition measurement. The qubit is initially in an equal-weight superposition of two quantum states. In the course of time, the detector signal is accumulated and the superposition is destroyed. The times required to resolve the quantum states and to destroy the superposition are of the same order. We prove numerically a rather counter intuitive fact: the average detector output conditioned on the final state does not depend on time. It looks like from the very beginning, the qubit knows in which state it is. We study statistics of decision times where the decision time is defined as time required for the density matrix along a certain trajectory to reach a threshold where it is close to one of the resulting states. This statistics is useful to estimate how fast a decisive CWLM can be. Basing on this, we devise and study a simple feedback scheme that attempts to keep the qubit in the equal-weight superposition. The detector readings are used to decide in which state the qubit is and which correction rotation to apply to bring it back to the superposition. We show how to optimize the feedback parameters and move towards more efficient feedback schemes.
In this paper, we establish a general theoretical framework for the description of continuous quantum measurements and the statistics of the results of such measurements. The framework concerns the measurement of an arbitrary quantum system with arbitrary number of detectors under realistic assumption of instant detector reactions and white noise sources. We attend various approaches to the problem showing their equivalence. The approaches include the full counting statistics (FCS) evolution equation a for pseudo-density matrix, the drift-diffusion equation for a density matrix in the space of integrated outputs, and discrete stochastic updates. We provide the derivation of the underlying equations from a microscopic approach based on full counting statistics method, a phenomenological approach based on Lindblad construction, and interaction with auxiliary quantum systems representing the detectors. We establish the necessary conditions on the phenomenological susceptibilities and noises that guarantee the unambiguous interpretation of the measurement results and the positivity of the density matrix. Our results can be easily extended to describe various quantum feedback schemes where the manipulation decision is based on the values of detector outputs.
Quantum Markov models have been successfully used to accurately model various physical quantum systems in fields such as quantum optics, optomechanics and superconducting circuits and they provide the basis for (measurement-based) quantum feedback control. However, the quantum Markov assumption is a strong one and it is not expected to hold for general quantum systems of interest. The projection operator approach is one approach that has been developed to model non-Markovian quantum systems by considering its embedding in a larger Markovian quantum system, but mainly in the context of quantum master equations for the dynamics of the unmonitored reduced quantum state of a quantum system. This approach was recently adapted for continuously measured non-Markovian quantum systems, which enables open-loop control but did not yet consider the presence of feedback of the stochastic measurement record, deriving non-Markovian SDEs for the evolution of the projected state of the Markovian embedding. This paper generalizes these stochastic equations to the setting of stochastic feedback based on the continuous-measurement record and shows that the equations take the same form but that previously deterministic terms become stochastic ones which depend on the measurement record, as would be intuitively expected. The stochastic equations are obtained for a generalized class of measurements that includes continuous (possibly adaptive) homodyne and photon counting measurements.