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Bulletin of the American Physical Society

Entanglement-assisted weak measurement

Shengshi Pang, Justin Dressel, Todd A. Brun

Published Mar 4, 2015• 0 citations
OpenAlex

Abstract

Postselected weak measurement has aroused broad interest for its distinctive ability to amplify small physical quantities. However, the low postselection efficiency to obtain a large weak value has been a big obstacle to its application in practice, since it can waste resources, and reduce the measurement precision. In this paper, we detail the entanglement-assisted postselected weak measurement protocol proposed in [Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 030401 (2014)], and study its robustness against technical noises. We show that when the systems are properly entangled, postselection can be made dramatically more efficient, and as a consequence, the Fisher information can be increased to approximately saturate the well-known Heisenberg limit. We illustrate this protocol by a qubit example. Readout errors can greatly degrade the performance of postselected weak measurement schemes. We show that entanglement can significantly reduce two main detrimental effects of readout errors: inaccuracy in the measurement result, and loss of the Fisher information. We further compensate for readout errors by a majority vote scheme for postselection. With a proper threshold, almost no Fisher information will be lost. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of entanglement in protecting postselected weak measurement against readout errors.

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Postselected weak measurement is a useful protocol for amplifying weak physical effects. However, there has recently been controversy over whether it gives any advantage in precision. While it is now clear that retaining failed postselections can yield more Fisher information than discarding them, the advantage of postselection measurement itself still remains to be clarified. In this Letter, we address this problem by studying two widely used estimation strategies: averaging measurement results, and maximum likelihood estimation, respectively. For the first strategy, we find a surprising result that squeezed coherent states of the pointer can give postselected weak measurements a higher signal-to-noise ratio than standard ones while all standard coherent states cannot, which suggests that raising the precision of weak measurements by postselection calls for the presence of "nonclassicality" in the pointer states. For the second strategy, we show that the quantum Fisher information of postselected weak measurements is generally larger than that of standard weak measurements, even without using the failed postselection events, but the gap can be closed with a proper choice of system state.

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Postselected weak measurement has aroused broad interest for its distinctive ability to amplify small physical quantities. However, the low postselection efficiency to obtain a large weak value has been a big obstacle to its application in practice, since it can waste resources, and reduce the measurement precision. In this paper, we detail the entanglement-assisted postselected weak measurement protocol proposed in [Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 030401 (2014)], and study its robustness against technical noises. We show that when the systems are properly entangled, postselection can be made dramatically more efficient, and as a consequence, the Fisher information can be increased to approximately saturate the well-known Heisenberg limit. We illustrate this protocol by a qubit example. Readout errors can greatly degrade the performance of postselected weak measurement schemes. We show that entanglement can significantly reduce two main detrimental effects of readout errors: inaccuracy in the measurement result, and loss of the Fisher information. We further compensate for readout errors by a majority vote scheme for postselection. With a proper threshold, almost no Fisher information will be lost. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of entanglement in protecting postselected weak measurement against readout errors.
Postselected weak measurement has aroused broad interest for its distinctive ability to amplify small physical quantities. However, the low postselection efficiency to obtain a large weak value has been a big obstacle to its application in practice since it may waste resources, and reduce the measurement precision. An improved protocol was proposed in Pang et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 113, 030401 (2014) to make the postselected weak measurement dramatically more efficient by using entanglement. Such a protocol can increase the Fisher information of the measurement to approximately saturate the well-known Heisenberg limit. In this paper, we review the entanglement-assisted protocol of postselected weak measurement in detail, and study its robustness against technical noises. We focus on readout errors. Readout errors can greatly degrade the performance of postselected weak measurement, especially when the readout error probability is comparable to the postselection probability. We show that entanglement can significantly reduce the two main detrimental effects of readout errors: inaccuracy in the measurement result and the loss of Fisher information. We extend the protocol by introducing a majority vote scheme to postselection to further compensate for readout errors. With a proper threshold, almost no Fisher information will be lost. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of entanglement in protecting postselected weak measurement against readout errors.
Large weak values have been used to amplify the sensitivity of a linear response signal for detecting changes in a small parameter, which has also enabled a simple method for precise parameter estimation. However, producing a large weak value requires a low postselection probability for an ancilla degree of freedom, which limits the utility of the technique. We propose an improvement to this method that uses entanglement to increase the efficiency. We show that by entangling and postselecting n ancillas, the postselection probability can be increased by a factor of n while keeping the weak value fixed (compared to n uncorrelated attempts with one ancilla), which is the optimal scaling with n that is expected from quantum metrology. Furthermore, we show the surprising result that the quantum Fisher information about the detected parameter can be almost entirely preserved in the postselected state, which allows the sensitive estimation to approximately saturate the relevant quantum Cramér-Rao bound. To illustrate this protocol we provide simple quantum circuits that can be implemented using current experimental realizations of three entangled qubits.
Weak measurement has garnered widespread interest for its ability to amplify small physical effects at the cost of low detection probabilities. Previous entanglement and recycling techniques enhance postselection efficiency and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of weak measurement from distinct perspectives. Here, we incorporate a power-recycling cavity into the entanglement-assisted weak measurement system. We obtain an improvement of both detection efficiency and Fisher information, driven by the combined effects of power cycling and entanglement. Furthermore, we analyze three types of errors: cavity power loss, walk-off errors, and readout errors. The conclusions suggest that entanglement is beneficial in mitigating the effects of cavity losses. Moreover, entanglement exacerbates the walk-off effect caused by recycling, but this detriment can be balanced by proper parameter selection. Additionally, power-recycling can complement entanglement in suppressing readout noise, thus enhancing the accuracy of the measurement results and recovering the lost Fisher information. This work delves deeper into the metrological advantages of weak measurement.
Weak measurement has garnered widespread interest for its ability to amplify small physical effects at the cost of low detection probabilities. Previous entanglement and recycling techniques enhance postselection efficiency and signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of weak measurement from distinct perspectives. Here, we incorporate a power recycling cavity into the entanglement-assisted weak measurement system. We obtain an improvement of both detection efficiency and Fisher information, and find that the improvement from entanglement and recycling occur in different dimensions. Furthermore, we analyze two types of errors, walk-off errors and readout errors. The conclusions suggest that entanglement exacerbates the walk-off effect caused by recycling, but this detriment can be balanced by proper parameter selection. In addition, power-recycling can complement entanglement in suppressing readout noise, thus enhancing the accuracy in the measurement results and recovering the lost Fisher information. This work delves deeper into the metrological advantages of weak measurement.
Weak measurement has ignited extensive research and discussions in the field of quantum metrology due to its sufficient potential in quantum measurement applications. Recent studies demonstrate that weak measurement protocols, when integrated with quantum resources, can achieve Heisenberg scaling while maintaining technical noise advantages. However, scenarios involving dephasing noise have not been addressed, as such noise induces rapid degradation of Heisenberg scaling to the standard quantum limit. Here, we incorporate phase fluctuations, a typical dephasing noise, into three Heisenberg-scaling systems. We find that postselection invariably reduces the robustness of quantum systems. Compared to coherent pointer states, squeezed coherent pointer states can exhibit superior resilience against phase fluctuations through appropriate squeezing-parameter optimization. In addition, in entanglement-assisted systems, we can optimize the postselected angle to compensate for Fisher information loss induced by the postselection process. Our findings reveal that weak measurement exhibits inherent limitations in dephasing noise metrology compared to conventional measurement.
Postselected weak measurement is a useful protocol for amplifying weak physical effects. However, there has recently been controversy over whether it gives any advantage in precision. While it is now clear that retaining failed postselections can yield more Fisher information than discarding them, the advantage of postselection measurement itself still remains to be clarified. In this Letter, we address this problem by studying two widely used estimation strategies: averaging measurement results, and maximum likelihood estimation, respectively. For the first strategy, we find a surprising result that squeezed coherent states of the pointer can give postselected weak measurements a higher signal-to-noise ratio than standard ones while all standard coherent states cannot, which suggests that raising the precision of weak measurements by postselection calls for the presence of "nonclassicality" in the pointer states. For the second strategy, we show that the quantum Fisher information of postselected weak measurements is generally larger than that of standard weak measurements, even without using the failed postselection events, but the gap can be closed with a proper choice of system state.