AbstractQuantum probing is the art of exploiting simple quantum systems interacting with a complex environment to extract precise information about some environmental parameters, e.g. the temperature of the environment or its spectral density. Here we analyze the performance of a single-qubit probe in characterizing Ohmic bosonic environments at thermal equilibrium. In particular, we analyze the effects of tuning the interaction Hamiltonian between the probe and the environment, going beyond the traditional paradigm of pure dephasing. In the weak-coupling and short-time regime, we address the dynamics of the probe analytically, whereas numerical simulations are employed in the strong coupling and long-time regime. We then evaluate the quantum Fisher information for the estimation of the cutoff frequency and the temperature of the environment. Our results provide clear evidence that pure dephasing is not optimal, unless we focus attention to short times. In particular, we found several working regimes where the presence of a transverse interaction improves the maximum attainable precision, i.e. it increases the quantum Fisher information. We also explore the role of the initial state of the probe and of the probe characteristic frequency in determining the estimation precision, thus providing quantitative guidelines to design optimized detection to characterize bosonic environments at the quantum level.
AbstractQuantum probing is the art of exploiting simple quantum systems interacting with a complex environment to extract precise information about some environmental parameters, e.g. the temperature of the environment or its spectral density. Here we analyze the performance of a single-qubit probe in characterizing Ohmic bosonic environments at thermal equilibrium. In particular, we analyze the effects of tuning the interaction Hamiltonian between the probe and the environment, going beyond the traditional paradigm of pure dephasing. In the weak-coupling and short-time regime, we address the dynamics of the probe analytically, whereas numerical simulations are employed in the strong coupling and long-time regime. We then evaluate the quantum Fisher information for the estimation of the cutoff frequency and the temperature of the environment. Our results provide clear evidence that pure dephasing is not optimal, unless we focus attention to short times. In particular, we found several working regimes where the presence of a transverse interaction improves the maximum attainable precision, i.e. it increases the quantum Fisher information. We also explore the role of the initial state of the probe and of the probe characteristic frequency in determining the estimation precision, thus providing quantitative guidelines to design optimized detection to characterize bosonic environments at the quantum level.
Abstract Quantum probing is the art of exploiting simple quantum systems interacting with a complex environment to extract precise information about some environmental parameters, e.g. the temperature of the environment or its spectral density. Here we analyze the performance of a single-qubit probe in characterizing Ohmic bosonic environments at thermal equilibrium. In particular, we analyze the effects of tuning the interaction Hamiltonian between the probe and the environment, going beyond the traditional paradigm of pure dephasing. In the weak-coupling and short-time regime, we address the dynamics of the probe analytically, whereas numerical simulations are employed in the strong coupling and long-time regime. We then evaluate the quantum Fisher information for the estimation of the cutoff frequency and the temperature of the environment. Our results provide clear evidence that pure dephasing is not optimal, unless we focus attention to short times. In particular, we found several working regimes where the presence of a transverse interaction improves the maximum attainable precision, i.e. it increases the quantum Fisher information. We also explore the role of the initial state of the probe and of the probe characteristic frequency in determining the estimation precision, thus providing quantitative guidelines to design optimized detection to characterize bosonic environments at the quantum level.
We address a particular instance where open quantum systems may be used as quantum probes for an emergent property of a complex system, as the temperature of a thermal bath. The inherent fragility of the quantum probes against decoherence is the key feature making the overall scheme very sensitive. The specific setting examined here is that of quantum thermometry, which aims to exploit decoherence as a resource to estimate the temperature of a sample. We focus on temperature estimation for a bosonic bath at equilibrium in the Ohmic regime (ranging from sub-Ohmic to super-Ohmic), by using pairs of qubits in different initial states and interacting with different environments, consisting either of a single thermal bath or of two independent ones at the same temperature. Our scheme involves pure dephasing of the probes, thus avoiding energy exchange with the sample and the consequent perturbation of temperature itself. We discuss the role of correlations among the probes and the presence of a local versus a global bath. We show that entanglement improves thermometry at short times if the two qubits are embedded in a common bath, whereas if the interaction time is not constrained, then coherence rather than entanglement is the key resource in quantum thermometry.
We investigate the quantum sensing performance of a dephasing qubit as a probe in Ohmic environments, characterized by the coupling strength η, the Ohmicity parameter s, and the cutoff frequency ωc to be estimated. The performance is quantified by the dimensionless quantum signal-to-noise ratio Q. We show that the evolution of Q with the scaled time ωct is independent of ωc, and peaks at an optimal time topt, yielding optimal sensitivity Qopt. We analyze how Qopt depends on η, s and the temperature T. Our results demonstrate that, for any Ohmic environment, provided that ωctopt≪1, Qopt always reaches the upper bound: Qmax=0.648 at zero temperature, and consistently attains Qmax/4 at high temperatures. Remarkably, we find that increasing the scaled temperature T/ωc can enhance Qopt by nearly two orders of magnitude compared to its zero-temperature counterpart for certain Ohmic environments. Our work reveals that temperature can serve as a resource to enhance sensing precision, as it accelerates the encoding of the cutoff frequency information into the probe state, thereby enabling optimal measurement within a short time window.
It is often the case that the environment of a quantum system may be described as a bath of oscillators with an ohmic density of states. In turn, the precise characterization of these classes of environments is a crucial tool to engineer decoherence or to tailor quantum information protocols. Recently, the use of quantum probes in characterizing ohmic environments at zero-temperature has been discussed, showing that a single qubit provides precise estimation of the cutoff frequency. On the other hand, thermal noise often spoil quantum probing schemes, and for this reason we here extend the analysis to a complex system at thermal equilibrium. In particular, we discuss the interplay between thermal fluctuations and time evolution in determining the precision attainable by quantum probes. Our results show that the presence of thermal fluctuations degrades the precision for low values of the cutoff frequency, i.e., values of the order ω c ≲ T (in natural units). For larger values of ω c , decoherence is mostly due to the structure of environment, rather than thermal fluctuations, such that quantum probing by a single qubit is still an effective estimation procedure.
We investigate the dynamical quantum Fisher information of a two-level system coupled to a bosonic environment, focusing on the estimation of the qubit gap. We combine analytical calculations with numerically controlled matrix-product-state simulations. In the exactly solvable pure-dephasing Ohmic regime at zero temperature, the long-time quantum Fisher information displays a coupling-dependent algebraic behavior, leading to a dynamical crossover: it grows without bound at weak coupling, approaches a finite asymptotic value at the crossover coupling, and vanishes at strong coupling. At finite temperature, thermal fluctuations suppress the long-time growth and generate a finite-time maximum, whose dependence on the dephasing coupling retains a clear signa- ture of the zero-temperature crossover. We show that this crossover is absent at zero temperature in non-Ohmic baths: the long-time quantum Fisher information vanishes in the sub-Ohmic and diverges in the super-Ohmic regimes. At non-zero temperature instead, the crossover appears for a super-Ohmic quadratic bath and the crossover coupling becomes temperature-dependent. Moreover, in the zero-temperature Ohmic regime, we introduce an additional amplitude-damping system-bath coupling that induces energy relaxation. This relaxation channel replaces the unbounded long-time growth with a finite asymptotic quantum Fisher information associated with the reduced interacting ground state, while a signature of the pure-dephasing crossover persists in the early-time dynamics. These results establish a direct connection between the low-frequency structure of the bath and the asymptotic metrological behavior of dynamical gap sensing, and show how thermal fluctuations and energy relaxation regularize the ideal pure-dephasing dynamical crossover of the quantum Fisher information.
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.