We derive the phase sensitivity of interference between squeezed vacuum and coherent light in the presence of photon losses. It is shown that losses shift the maximal phase sensitivity towards lower fractions of squeezed light.
Two-path interferometry with coherent states and a squeezed vacuum can achieve phase sensitivities close to the Heisenberg limit when the average photon number of the squeezed vacuum is close to the average photon number of the coherent light. Here, we investigate the phase sensitivity of such states in the presence of photon losses. It is shown that the Cramer-Rao bound of phase sensitivity can be achieved experimentally by using a weak local oscillator and photon counting in the output. The phase sensitivity is then given by the Fisher information F of the state. In the limit of high squeezing, the ratio (F−−N)/N2 of Fisher information above shot noise to the square of the average photon number N depends only on the average number of photons lost, nloss, and the fraction of squeezed vacuum photons $\ensuremath{\mu}$. For $\ensuremath{\mu}=1/2$, the effect of losses is given by (F−−N)/N2=1/(1+2nloss). The possibility of increasing the robustness against losses by lowering the squeezing fraction $\ensuremath{\mu}$ is considered, and an optimized result is derived. However, the improvements are rather small, with a maximal improvement by a factor of 2 at high losses.
We study the phase sensitivity of an SU(1,1) interferometer with two input beams in the displaced squeezed vacuum state and the coherent state, respectively. We find that there exists an optimal squeezing fraction of the displaced squeezed vacuum state that optimizes the phase sensitivity. We also examine the effects of some factors, including the loss, mean photon number of the input beams and amplitude gain of the optical parameter amplifiers, on the optimal squeezing fraction so that we can choose the optimal values to enhance the phase sensitivity.
Abstract We theoretically study the phase sensitivities of two different phase-shift configurations in an SU(1,1) interferometer with coherent ⊗ squeezed vacuum states. According to quantum Cramér-Rao theorem, we analytically obtain the ultimate phase sensitivities for two types of phase shift accumulating in one- and two-arm. Compared with the case of one-arm phase shift, the model with phase shift encoding in both arms may provide a better sensitivity when the strength of squeezed vacuum state is large enough. Furthermore, we discuss the achievable sensitivities with the homodyne measurement by invoking of error-propagation formula. In addition, we study the effect of internal and outernal photon losses on the phase sensitivity of the SU(1,1) interferometer and find that the unbalanced interferometer is helpful to improve precision even with high external losses .
We study the phase sensitivity in the conventional SU(2) and nonconventional SU(1,1) interferometers with a coherent and squeezed vacuum input state via quantum Cramer-Rao bound. We explicitly construct the detection scheme that gives the optimal phase sensitivity. For practical purposes, we show that in the presence of photon loss, both interferometers with proper homodyne detections are nearly optimal. We also find that unlike the coherent state and the squeezed vacuum state, the effects of imperfect detector on the phase sensitivity cannot be asymptotically removed for a generic coherent-squeezed state.