An appropriate weak value can be used to amplify weak physical parameters and improve the precision of parameter estimation in the process of quantum weak measurement. The increase of the precision of such a parameter estimation may originate from the entanglement in the system. This paper uses Fisher information to study the influence of the entanglement in the system and the entanglement between the system and the pointer on the estimation precision of the coupling parameters between the system and the pointer in the process of weak measurement. The entanglement of the entangled pure state of the GHZ-like state and the entangled mixed state affected by the depolarization noise and the influence of the entanglement between the system and the pointer on the parameter estimation are analyzed. The results show that the Fisher information quantity increases with the increase of the initial state entanglement degree of the system when the initial state of the system is an entangled pure state or an entangled mixed state affected by depolarization noise, and both the Fisher information quantity and the post-selection probability reach their maximum values when the initial and final state of the system are both the maximum entangled states; but the weaker the entanglement between the system and the pointer, the more the Fisher information obtained in the measurement will be and the higher the accuracy of parameter estimation. These research results show that the entanglement in the system will improve the precision of parameter estimation, while the entanglement between the system and the pointer will reduce the precision of parameter estimation.
An appropriate weak value can be used to amplify weak physical parameters and improve the precision of parameter estimation in the process of quantum weak measurement. The increase of the precision of such a parameter estimation may originate from the entanglement in the system. This paper uses Fisher information to study the influence of the entanglement in the system and the entanglement between the system and the pointer on the estimation precision of the coupling parameters between the system and the pointer in the process of weak measurement. The entanglement of the entangled pure state of the GHZ-like state and the entangled mixed state affected by the depolarization noise and the influence of the entanglement between the system and the pointer on the parameter estimation are analyzed. The results show that the Fisher information quantity increases with the increase of the initial state entanglement degree of the system when the initial state of the system is an entangled pure state or an entangled mixed state affected by depolarization noise, and both the Fisher information quantity and the post-selection probability reach their maximum values when the initial and final state of the system are both the maximum entangled states; but the weaker the entanglement between the system and the pointer, the more the Fisher information obtained in the measurement will be and the higher the accuracy of parameter estimation. These research results show that the entanglement in the system will improve the precision of parameter estimation, while the entanglement between the system and the pointer will reduce the precision of parameter estimation.
In this study, we investigate whether the weak measurement can enhance the estimation precision, when coupling between system and measurement apparatus is extremely weak. Our result shows that the weak measurement could enhance the estimation precision, when the noise is introduced during interaction process. By calculating and comparing the Fisher information under weak measurement and traditional quantum measurement scheme, we quantify the precision-improvement by the weak measurement and find the optimal post-selection protocol. Furthermore, we argue that there exists a threshold for the noise strength that the quantum weak measurement renders a higher precision compared to the traditional measurement.
The weak-value amplification is extensively considered in precision metrology in order to achieve a higher sensitivity. Despite the practical benefits in amplifying small physical quantities, its metrological advantage still arouses a broad debate due to the low postselection probability of success. In this paper, by employing the quantum Fisher information metric, we show that the precision of estimating an unknown parameter can be improved by introducing a precoupling process with properly chosen interaction operators. We point out this result is credible for both real and imaginary weak values. By tracking the meter wave functions, we find this enhancement of estimation precision comes from a precoupling induced modulation of the meter wave function, thus the most sensitive regime with respect to the parameter is reached. In addition, the estimation error is investigated by considering the difference between the theoretical and estimated value. The analysis suggests that this kind of error can be effectively suppressed by averaging the estimations resulted from different initial meter states. These results are finally illustrated by an exact numerical simulation where the advantages of our proposal are displayed by the comparison to the standard weak-value amplification scheme.
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.
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.
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.