Quantum mechanical systems can be used to out perform classical ones in several tasks. For instance, quantum correlations can be employed to beat the shot-noise limit in metrology protocols. Such parameter estimation methods are crucial for both advances in science and the development of technologies. Almost all quantum technologies operate with some level of noise and how quantum-enhancement fares in the presence of noise is still unclear. Here we show that, when a system in mixed multipartite quantum state is used to estimate a parameter, the information must be decoded by coherent interactions between the parts of the probe. On the other hand, noiseless quantum metrology protocols are adaptively additive for any pure entangled states, that is, no coherent processing is necessary in this case. This leads to an operational interpretation for the ability of performing coherent interactions in noisy parameter estimation and highlights a cornerstone difference between mixed and pure states. This result has fundamental importance in the search for the source of quantum advantage and it also has practical relevance for the designing of new high-precision-measurement devices.
Quantum mechanical systems can be used to out perform classical ones in several tasks. For instance, quantum correlations can be employed to beat the shot-noise limit in metrology protocols. Such parameter estimation methods are crucial for both advances in science and the development of technologies. Almost all quantum technologies operate with some level of noise and how quantum-enhancement fares in the presence of noise is still unclear. Here we show that, when a system in mixed multipartite quantum state is used to estimate a parameter, the information must be decoded by coherent interactions between the parts of the probe. On the other hand, noiseless quantum metrology protocols are adaptively additive for any pure entangled states, that is, no coherent processing is necessary in this case. This leads to an operational interpretation for the ability of performing coherent interactions in noisy parameter estimation and highlights a cornerstone difference between mixed and pure states. This result has fundamental importance in the search for the source of quantum advantage and it also has practical relevance for the designing of new high-precision-measurement devices.
It is well known that a quantum correlated probe can yield better precision in estimating an unknown parameter than classically possible. However, how such a quantum probe should be measured remains somewhat elusive. We examine the role of measurements in quantum metrology by considering two types of readout strategies: coherent , where all probes are measured simultaneously in an entangled basis; and adaptive , where probes are measured sequentially, with each measurement one way conditioned on the prior outcomes. Here we firstly show that for classically correlated probes the two readout strategies yield the same precision. Secondly, we construct an example of a noisy multipartite quantum system where coherent readout yields considerably better precision than adaptive readout. This highlights a fundamental difference between classical and quantum parameter estimation. From the practical point of view, our findings are relevant for the optimal design of precision-measurement quantum devices.
Recently, the fast development of quantum technologies led to the need for tools allowing the characterization of quantum resources. In particular, the ability to estimate non-classical aspects, e.g. entanglement and quantum discord, in two-qubit systems, is relevant to optimise the performance of quantum information processes. Here we present an experiment in which the amount of entanglement and discord are measured exploiting different estimators. Among them, some will prove to be optimal, i.e., able to reach the ultimate precision bound allowed by quantum mechanics. These estimation techniques have been tested with a specific family of states ranging from nearly pure Bell states to completely mixed states. This work represents a significant step towards the development of reliable metrological tools for quantum technologies.
This thesis explores various protocols which can be applied to quantum metrology, such that precision of the measurement can beat the best classical approaches. We first demonstrate that ancilla-assisted schemes can improve phase estimation in the presence of noise, and we propose an experiment to demonstrate these effects. Given that the use of ancillae helps, it is no surprise that there are noisy channels for which the optimal strategy may depend on the noise level. We show that there is a non-trivial crossover between the ancilla-assisted strategy and the parallel-entangled strategy for Pauli noise channels and the amplitude damping channel. We see that under certain circumstances, the environment cannot access the parameter of interest. We then integrated techniques from quantum communication, to derive a general framework that renders quantum metrology protocols into cryptographic ones. Here the protocol is unconditionally secure if the trusted parties wish only to achieve the standard quantum limit. If Heisenberg-limited precision is to be achieved, they sacrifice some security, where adversaries can access information, but only at the risk of getting caught at it (cheat-sensitivity). In many scenarios, the quantum Fisher information is achieved for only one value of the phase. In a particular phase estimation scheme that measures the parity at the output of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer where the input is a two-mode squeezed vacuum, this problem is particularly imminent. We apply an adaptive technique to resolve this issue, showing that one can achieve precisions substantially below the shot noise limit. The key to a quadratically enhanced improvement in quantum metrology is entanglement. Finally, we demonstrate in a photonic system how high-dimensional entanglement can be certified, and provide an alternate interpretation of entanglement from an information-theoretic perspective.
The technological progress of the last few decades has brought us the ability of exploiting quantum effects to accomplish a variety of relevant tasks. Yet, quantum phenomena are fragile, and with the ability to engineer quantum information protocols comes the problem of keeping such information safe from the detrimental effects of noise and losses. In the present work we investigate continuous variables Gaussian quantum information in noisy environments, studying the effects of various noise sources in the cases of a quantum metrological task, an error correction scheme and discord-type correlations. We engage each of the topics from a theoretical point of view, successively delving into the details of the experimental realizations and concluding with a survey of the results. In particular, we present experimental implementation of an ab initio, deterministic, real-time adaptive phase estimation protocol in a realistic thermalized scenario, we investigate the performance of an error correction scheme for elimination of correlated noise in a quantum channel, and we study the robustness of discord-type quantum correlations when subject to additive noise and attenuation.
The main obstacle for practical quantum technology is the noise, which can induce the decoherence and destroy the potential quantum advantages. The fluctuation of a field, which induces the dephasing of the system, is one of the most common noises and widely regarded as detrimental to quantum technologies. Here we show, contrary to the conventional belief, the fluctuation can be used to improve the precision limits in quantum metrology for the estimation of various parameters. Specifically, we show that for the estimation of the direction and rotating frequency of a field, the achieved precisions at the presence of the fluctuation can even surpass the highest precision achievable under the unitary dynamics which have been widely taken as the ultimate limit. We provide explicit protocols, which employs the adaptive quantum error correction, to achieve the higher precision limits with the fluctuating fields. Our study provides a completely new perspective on the role of the noises in quantum metrology. It also opens the door for higher precisions beyond the limit that has been believed to be ultimate.
Nonclassical correlations beyond entanglement might provide a resource in quantum information tasks, such as quantum computation or quantum metrology. Quantum discord is a measure of nonclassical correlations to which entanglement belongs as a subset. Exploring the operational meaning of quantum discord as a resource in quantum information processing tasks, such as quantum metrology, is of essential importance to our understanding of nonclassical correlations. In our recent work [Phys. Rev. A 98, 012115 (2018)], we considered a protocol---which we call the greedy local thermometry protocol---for estimating the temperature of thermal equilibrium states from local measurements, elucidating the role of diagonal discord in enhancing the protocol sensitivity in the high-temperature limit. In this paper, we extend our results to a general greedy local parameter estimation scenario. In particular, we introduce a quantum discord---which we call discord for local metrology---to quantify the nonclassical correlations induced by the local optimal measurement on the subsystem. We demonstrate explicitly that discord for local metrology plays a role in sensitivity enhancement in the high-temperature limit by showing its relation to loss in quantum Fisher information. In particular, it coincides with diagonal discord for estimating a linear coupling parameter.