In this paper, we explore how to estimate the phase damping parameter γ and the tunneling amplitude parameter Δ from a spin-boson dephasing quantum model by periodical projective measurements. The preparation of initial states is accomplished by performing the period measurements in our scheme. The parameter γ can be always estimated when projective measurement bases are chosen as θ = π /2 and ϕ = 0. Based on the estimated value of γ and the interval information of Δ, we can select another measurement bases ( θ = π /4 and ϕ = π /2) to obtain the estimated value of Δ . A coherent control is indispensable to estimate Δ if γ is in the interval of Δ; whereas the control is not necessary if γ is out of the known interval of Δ . We establish the relation between the optimal period time and the parameter γ or Δ in terms of Fisher information. Although the optimal measurement period cannot be selected beforehand, the aforementioned relation can be utilized to adjust the measurement period to approach the optimal one.
In this paper, we explore how to estimate the phase damping parameter γ and the tunneling amplitude parameter Δ from a spin-boson dephasing quantum model by periodical projective measurements. The preparation of initial states is accomplished by performing the period measurements in our scheme. The parameter γ can be always estimated when projective measurement bases are chosen as θ = π /2 and ϕ = 0. Based on the estimated value of γ and the interval information of Δ, we can select another measurement bases ( θ = π /4 and ϕ = π /2) to obtain the estimated value of Δ . A coherent control is indispensable to estimate Δ if γ is in the interval of Δ; whereas the control is not necessary if γ is out of the known interval of Δ . We establish the relation between the optimal period time and the parameter γ or Δ in terms of Fisher information. Although the optimal measurement period cannot be selected beforehand, the aforementioned relation can be utilized to adjust the measurement period to approach the optimal one.
We investigate the role of non-selective measurement on the estimation of system-environment parameters. Projective measurement is the popular method of initial state preparation which always prepares a pure state. However, in various physical situations of physical interest, this selective measurement becomes unrealistic. In this paper, we compare the estimation results obtained via projective measurement with the results obtained via unitary operation. We argue that in typical situations, parameters can be estimated with higher accuracy if the initial state is prepared with the unitary operator (a pulse). We consider the spin-spin model where a central two-level system (probe) interacts with the collections of two-level systems (bath). A probe interacts with a bath and attains a thermal equilibrium state, then via unitary operation, the initial state is prepared which evolves unitarily. The properties of the bath are imprinted on the reduced dynamics. Due to the initial probe-bath correlations present in the thermal equilibrium state, an additional factor arises in the dynamics which has a phenomenal role in the parameter estimation. In this paper, we study the estimation of bath temperature and probe-bath coupling strength which is quantified by the quantum Fisher information. Our results are promising as one can improve the precision of the estimates by orders of magnitude via non-selective measurement and by incorporating the effect of initial correlations.
Abstract We estimate the initial weight and phase parameters ( θ , ϕ ) of a single qubit system initially prepared in the coherent state | θ , ϕ 〉 and in interaction with three different shapes of pulses; rectangular, exponential, and sin 2 -pulses. In general, we show that the estimation degree of the weight parameter depends on the pulse shape and the initial phase angle, ( ϕ ) . For the rectangular pulse case, increasing the estimating rate of the weight parameter via the Fisher information function ( F θ ) is possible with small values of the atomic detuning parameter and larger values of pulse strength. Fisher information ( F ϕ ) increases suddenly at the resonant case to reach its maximum value if the initial phase ϕ = π / 2 and consequently one may estimate the phase parameter with a high degree of precision. If the initial system is coded with classical information, the upper bounds of Fisher information for resonant and non-resonant cases are much larger and consequently, one may estimate the phase parameter with a high degree of accuracy. Similarly, as the detuning increases the Fisher information decreases and therefore the possibility of estimating the phase parameter decreases. For exponential and sin 2 -pulses the Fisher information is maximum ( F θ , ϕ = 1 ) and consequently, one can always estimate the weight and the phase parameters ( θ , ϕ ) with a high degree of precision.
We propose a scheme to overcome phase damping decoherence by periodically performing open loop tracking control and projective measurement. Although it is impossible to stabilize a qubit subject to Markovian dynamics only by open loop coherent control, one can attain a ``softened'' control goal with the help of periodical projective measurement. The ``softened'' control objective in our scheme is to keep the state of the controlled qubit to stay near a reference pure state with a high probability for a sufficiently long time. Two suboptimal control problems are given in the sense of trace distance and fidelity, respectively, and they are eventually reduced to the design of a period T. In our scheme, one can choose the period T as long as possible if the ``softened'' control goal is attained. This is in contrast to the observation that quantum Zeno effect takes place only if measurements are performed in a very frequent manner, i.e., the period T must be extremely small.
We investigate the optimal estimation of dephasing in finite-dimensional quantum spin systems. We first discuss some properties of the optimal probe states and present an efficient numerical algorithm to compute the optimal precision in dephasing estimation and identify the optimal probe states. For the dephasing channel arising from Gaussian phase diffusion, a spin cat state is known to be optimal for small dephasing. We analytically determine the range of dephasing strengths over which the cat state remains globally optimal for spins J=1 and J=3/2, and derive upper bounds on its optimality region for larger spins. We then compare numerically several probe states proposed in the literature, showing in particular that the simple class of probes obtained from uniform superpositions of all levels performs near-optimally for stronger dephasing. Finally, we apply our framework to a central-spin model coupled to a nuclear-spin bath, whose dynamics we simulate using the cluster-correlation expansion. Our results show that, while the cat state is optimal for weak Gaussian dephasing, pulse-controlled non-Markovian dynamics can favor states with amplitudes distributed over multiple spin levels, and in some cases the uniform state outperforms the other fixed probes considered. This shows how the choice of probe state depends both on the dephasing strength and on the dynamics.
Abstract Projective measurement is a popular method of initial state preparation, which always prepares a pure state. However, in various physical situations of interest, this selective measurement becomes unrealistic. In this paper, we investigate the role of pulsed measurement (a unitary operation) on the estimation of system-environment parameters and compare the estimation results obtained via projective measurement with the results obtained via unitary operation. We argue that in typical situations, parameters can be estimated with higher accuracy if the initial state is prepared with the unitary operator (a pulse). We consider the spin-spin model in which a central two-level system (probe) interacts with a collection of two-level systems (bath). The probe interacts with the bath and attains thermal equilibrium. Then, via unitary operation, the initial state is prepared which evolves unitarily. The properties of the bath are imprinted on the reduced dynamics. Due to the initial probe-bath correlations present in the thermal equilibrium state, an additional factor arises in the dynamics, which has an important role in the parameter estimation. In this paper, we study the estimation of bath temperature and probe-bath coupling strength which is quantified by the quantum Fisher information. Our results are promising as one can improve the precision of the estimates by orders of magnitude (especially in the coupling strength case) via unitary operation and by incorporating the effect of initial correlations.
Small, controllable quantum systems, known as quantum probes, have been proposed to estimate various parameters characterizing complex systems such as the environments of quantum systems. These probes, prepared in some initial state, are allowed to interact with their environment, and subsequent measurements reveal information about different quantities characterizing the environment, such as the system-environment coupling strength, the cutoff frequency, and the temperature. These estimates have generally been made by considering only the way that the probe undergoes decoherence. However, we show that information about the environment is also imprinted on the probe via the probe and environment correlations that exist before the probe state preparation. This information can then be used to improve our estimates for any environment. We apply this general result to the particular case of a two-level system probe undergoing pure dephasing, due to a harmonic-oscillator environment, to show that a drastic increase in the quantum Fisher information, and hence the precision of our estimates, can indeed be obtained. We also consider applying periodic control pulses to the probe to show that with a combination of the two---the effect of the control pulses as well as the initial correlations---the quantum Fisher information can be increased by orders of magnitude.