Entanglement has been proposed as a means to improve the sensitivity of sensing weak signals. While the degree of this quantum advantage is well understood in noiseless settings, the situation is more complex under realistic conditions, where the system is subject to decoherence. In this case, the enhancement depends on the specific noise characteristics. Previous treatments of colored noise typically assume that the noise is uncorrelated between successive experiments. Here, we consider the scenario in which the noise exhibits correlations across multiple shots. We derive a simple fundamental limit to the sensitivity based on the fact that the sensitivity cannot be better than the signal-to-noise ratio seen by the probe. Focusing on Ramsey spectroscopy with probes affected by pure classical dephasing, we show that, for suitable spatial and temporal noise correlations, entangled probes achieve a better scaling of the sensitivity with the number of probes than separable states. This demonstrates that entanglement can provide a substantial improvement for Ramsey spectroscopy subject to correlated noise.
Entanglement has been proposed as a means to improve the sensitivity of sensing weak signals. While the degree of this quantum advantage is well understood in noiseless settings, the situation is more complex under realistic conditions, where the system is subject to decoherence. In this case, the enhancement depends on the specific noise characteristics. Previous treatments of colored noise typically assume that the noise is uncorrelated between successive experiments. Here, we consider the scenario in which the noise exhibits correlations across multiple shots. We derive a simple fundamental limit to the sensitivity based on the fact that the sensitivity cannot be better than the signal-to-noise ratio seen by the probe. Focusing on Ramsey spectroscopy with probes affected by pure classical dephasing, we show that, for suitable spatial and temporal noise correlations, entangled probes achieve a better scaling of the sensitivity with the number of probes than separable states. This demonstrates that entanglement can provide a substantial improvement for Ramsey spectroscopy subject to correlated noise.
The use of entanglement in sensing is often motivated by improved sensitivity arising from non-classical correlations among probes. For static signals, however, this quantum advantage in Ramsey spectroscopy with N probes is known to be highly susceptible to dephasing, which severely limits the possible gain from entanglement. In contrast, we consider sensing of signals that vary in time. Considering the simplest example of dephasing by classical white noise, we show that entanglement allows a large increase in bandwidth when estimating the frequency components of a time-dependent signal. Without sacrificing any sensitivity, entanglement allows for an increase in bandwidth by a factor of N. Alternatively, when interrogation times are limited by the signal bandwidth rather than by dephasing, the average estimation uncertainty over a fixed bandwidth is reduced by a factor of N compared with separable states.
Noise sensing underlies many physical applications including tests of non-classicality, thermometry, verification of correlated phases of quantum matter, and characterization of criticality. While previous works have shown that quantum resources such as entanglement and squeezing can enhance the sensitivity in estimating deterministic signals, less is known about the entanglement advantage in sensing correlated stochastic signals (noise). In this work, we compute the fundamental sensitivity limits of quantum sensors in probing spatiotemporally correlated noise. We first prove the fundamental quantum limits in sensing spatially correlated Markovian noise using entangled and unentangled sensors, respectively. Focusing on power-law spatial noise correlations, which naturally arise in condensed matter systems with long-range interactions and/or near criticality, we further derive a scalable entanglement advantage when the power-law decays slowly. Then, considering a target signal with a 1/fp-type spectrum, we demonstrate that non-Markovianity may entirely modify the nature of entanglement advantage in estimating spatial noise correlations. Our protocols can be implemented using state-of-the-art quantum sensing platforms including solid-state defects, superconducting circuits, and neutral atoms.
Correlated noise naturally arises in quantum systems due to, e.g., phase and amplitude fluctuations in global control or long-range correlations generated by a many-body sensing target near criticality. In this Letter, we propose a new form of exponential quantum advantage in the context of sensing correlated noise. Specifically, we focus on the problem of estimating parameters associated with Lindblad dephasing dynamics, and show that entanglement enhancement in the sensitivity (as quantified via quantum Fisher information of the sensor state) arises for estimating the strength of fluctuations in the noise fields' center-of-mass mode. In the presence of strong background fluctuations, such enhancement grows exponentially with the number of probes in the shot-limited regime, where the measurement and reset operations are slow. This result stands in stark contrast with previously studied scenarios of sensing uncorrelated dephasing noise, where one can prove that entanglement does not lead to an advantage in the signal-to-noise ratio. Our Letter thus opens a novel pathway toward achieving entanglement-based sensing advantage, which may find applications in characterizing decoherence dynamics of near-term quantum devices. Further, our approach provides a potential quantum-enhanced probe of many-body correlated phases by measuring noise generated by a sensing target. We also discuss realization of our protocol using near-term quantum hardware.
Dephasing noise is a ubiquitous source of decoherence in current atomic sensors. We address the problem of entanglement-assisted frequency estimation subject to classical dephasing noise with full spatial correlations (collective) and arbitrary temporal correlations. Our contributions are threefold. (i) We derive rigorous, state-independent bounds on the achievable estimation precision, showing how they are entirely determined by the short-time behavior of the decoherence function. For temporally uncorrelated (Markovian) dephasing, precision is limited by a probe-independent constant. For temporally correlated stationary noise, the bound approaches the noiseless limit for classical states, precluding any asymptotic quantum advantage. (ii) We show that these scaling bounds are tight, by constructing generalized Ramsey protocols that saturate them. These optimal protocols use squeezing at the input and before readout, both of which are available in state-of-the-art atomic interferometers. Implementing a perfect-echo protocol, which reaches Heisenberg scaling in the absence of noise, remains optimal in this noisy setting, irrespective of the noise temporal correlations. (iii) We prove that arbitrary collective open-loop control cannot lift the no-go for super-classical precision scaling under either Markovian or colored stationary noise, highlighting the detrimental nature of full spatial correlations. In the latter case, temporal correlations may nonetheless enable constant-factor improvements over the standard quantum limit, which may still be important in practical metrological scenarios.
Abstract We study the estimation precision attainable by entanglement-enhanced Ramsey interferometry in the presence of spatiotemporally correlated non-classical noise. Our analysis relies on an exact expression of the reduced density matrix of the qubit probes under general zero-mean Gaussian stationary dephasing, which is established through cumulant-expansion techniques and may be of independent interest in the context of non-Markovian open dynamics. By continuing and expanding our previous work (Beaudoin et al 2018 Phys. Rev. A 98 020102(R)), we analyze the effects of a non-collective coupling regime between the qubit probes and their environment, focusing on two limiting scenarios where the couplings may take only two or a continuum of possible values. In the paradigmatic case of spin–boson dephasing noise from a thermal environment, we find that it is in principle possible to suppress, on average, the effect of spatial correlations by randomizing the location of the probes, as long as enough configurations are sampled where noise correlations are negative. As a result, superclassical precision scaling is asymptotically restored for initial entangled states, including experimentally accessible one-axis spin-squeezed states.
Quantum entangled states have a potential to beat the standard quantum limit (SQL) and approach the Heisenberg limit (HL). We previously demonstrated that phase shifts induced by magnetic fields are coherently accumulated in a Ramsey protocol using an entangled Nitrogen-Vacancy (NV) pair. However, the sensitivity is limited to the order of ~µT/√Hz due to the various sources of error and noise, including classical readout noise, spin manipulation and initialization errors, and decoherence error. One of the most critical problems is that decoherence of entangled sensing proceeds more rapidly than ensemble-based sensing. When decoherence follows a Markovian process (i.e., when the environment noises behave as white noise without autocorrelation), the sensitivity of entangled sensing is limited to SQL3,4. Therefore, enhancement from entanglement cannot be achieved under the white noise conditions. To realize entanglement-enhanced sensing to beat SQL, it is essential to characterize the environment noise and prepare a suitable condition. In this study, we conducted noise spectroscopy to evaluate the environmental noise and demonstrated that diamond NV centers have the potential to beat SQL.