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Physical Review A

Criticality in two-mode interferometers

Hongbin Liang, Yuguo Su, Xiao Xiao, Yanming Che, Barry C. Sanders, Xiaoguang Wang

Published Jul 22, 2020• 7 citations
Publisher

Abstract

To achieve the optimal phase sensitivity in two-mode interferometers, one key problem is how to distribute photons between the two input ports, given a fixed total average photon number. In both the $\text{SU}(2)$ and $\text{SU}(1,1)$ interferometers with a product of coherent and Fock states as inputs, we find there exists a critical value of the total photon number, below which the optimal phase sensitivity can be achieved with the second port being the vacuum state. The critical points can be analytically fixed. We further consider a more general input state as a product of coherent and squeezed Fock states. Then we analytically identify three regions in the parameter space, similar to a phase diagram, and find that critical phenomena occur in two regions. If the total average input photon number is less than the critical value, the optimal distribution tends to minimize the average photon number in the second port. Our finding indicates that, in order to get interferometers with high sensitivity, one must carefully choose the photon number distribution according to the value of the input total average photon number. This central result will be useful in theoretical studies in the field of quantum parameter estimation.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.102.013722

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To achieve the optimal phase sensitivity in two-mode interferometers, one key problem is how to distribute photons between the two input ports, given a fixed total average photon number. In both the SU(2)\text{SU}(2)SU(2) and SU(1,1)\text{SU}(1,1)SU(1,1) interferometers with a product of coherent and Fock states as inputs, we find there exists a critical value of the total photon number, below which the optimal phase sensitivity can be achieved with the second port being the vacuum state. The critical points can be analytically fixed. We further consider a more general input state as a product of coherent and squeezed Fock states. Then we analytically identify three regions in the parameter space, similar to a phase diagram, and find that critical phenomena occur in two regions. If the total average input photon number is less than the critical value, the optimal distribution tends to minimize the average photon number in the second port. Our finding indicates that, in order to get interferometers with high sensitivity, one must carefully choose the photon number distribution according to the value of the input total average photon number. This central result will be useful in theoretical studies in the field of quantum parameter estimation.
Abstract We derive a general phase-matching condition (PMC) for enhancement of sensitivity in SU(1,1) interferometers. Under this condition, the quantum Fisher information (QFI) of two-mode SU(1,1) interferometry becomes maximal with respect to the relative phase of two modes, for the case of an arbitrary state in one input port and an even (odd) state in the other port, and the phase sensitivity is enhanced. We also find that optimal parameters can let the QFI in some areas achieve the Heisenberg limit for both pure and mixed initial states. As examples, we consider several input states: coherent and even coherent states, squeezed vacuum and even coherent states, squeezed thermal and even coherent states. Furthermore, in the realistic scenario of the photon loss channel, we investigate the effect of photon losses on QFI with numerical studies. We find the PMC remains unchanged and is not affected by the transmission coefficients for the above input states. Our results suggest that the PMC can exist in various kinds of interferometers and the phase-matching is robust to even strong photon losses.
We theoretically derive the lower and upper bounds of quantum Fisher information (QFI) of an SU(1,1) interferometer whatever the input state chosen. According to the QFI, the crucial resource for quantum enhancement is shown to be large intramode correlations indicated by the Mandel QQQ parameter. The subtraction of photons from the squeezed vacuum state has the effect of increasing the average photon number of the new field state, as well as the intramode correlations. For example, for a coherent state $\ensuremath{\bigotimes}$ a squeezed vacuum state with a given fixed input mean number of photons as the input, if ppp photons are subtracted from the squeezed-vacuum state before inputting the SU(1,1) interferometer, the phase sensitivities can be improved due to the intramode-correlation increment.
The fundamental precision limit of an interferometer is crucial since it bounds the best possible sensitivity one could achieve using such a device. This thesis will focus on several different interferometers and try to give the ultimate precision bounds by carefully counting all the resources used in the interferometers. The thesis begins with the basics of the quantum state of light. The fundamentals of quantum metrology are also reviewed and discussed. More specifically, the terminology of classical and quantum Cram\'er-Rao bound and classical and quantum Fisher information are introduced. Chapter 3 discusses the conclusive precision bounds in two-mode interferometer such as Mach-Zehnder interferometer (MZI) and SU(1,1) interferometer. I revisit the quantum Fisher information approach of these two interferometers and show the discrepancy of phase sensitivity on the physically same setup. Then I establish fundamental precision estimation bounds for such device, due to the reason that many works of literature fail to accurately count the resources and knowledge of phase-to-be-estimated used in the interferometers. The analysis suggests that for a MZI, one can never do better than SNL in phase sensitivity, when an input to one of the two ports is the vacuum. If one does not allow the detector to use any external phase reference or power resource, then the precision is limited by the SNL. For a SU(1,1) interferometer, firstly, when one of the input states is restricted to be a vacuum state, I showed that by using either the phase-averaging method or the quantum Fisher information matrix method, different phase configurations of the SU(1,1) interferometer result in the same QFI. Secondly, I compared the results of the phase-averaging method and the quantum Fisher information matrix method, and then I argued that for an SU(1,1) interferometer, phase averaging or quantum Fisher information matrix method is generally required, and they are equivalent. Finally, I used the quantum Fisher information matrix method to calculate the precision limit for other common input states, such as two coherent state inputs or coherent state with squeezed vacuum inputs. In chapter 4, I will consider a passive multi-mode interferometer for multiparameter phase estimation. It was suggested that optical networks with relatively inexpensive overhead---single photon Fock states, passive optical elements, and single photon detection---can show significant improvements over classical strategies for single-parameter estimation, when the number of modes in the network is small. In this chapter, I analytically compute the quantum Cramer-Rao bound to show these
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.
We theoretically study the effect of quantum statistics of the light field on the quantum enhancement of parameter estimation based on cat state input the SU(1,1) interferometer. The phase sensitivity is dependent on the relative phase θθθ between two coherent states of Schrödinger cat states. The optimal sensitivity is achieved when the relative phase is πππ% , i.e., odd coherent states input. For a coherent state input into one port, the phase sensitivity of the odd coherent state into the second input port is inferior to that of the squeezed vacuum state input. However, in the presence of losses the Schrödinger cat states are more resistant to loss than squeezed vacuum states. As the amplitude of Schrödinger cat states increases, the quantum enhancement of phase sensitivity decreases, which shows that the quantum statistics of Schrödinger cat states tends towards Poisson statistics from sub-Poisson statistics or super-Poisson statistics.
We consider an interferometer powered by laser light (a coherent state) into one input port and ask the following question: what is the best state to inject into the second input port, given a constraint on the mean number of photons this state can carry, in order to optimize the interferometer's phase sensitivity? This question is the practical question for high-sensitivity interferometry. We answer the question by considering the quantum Cramér-Rao bound for such a setup. The answer is squeezed vacuum.