Exponentially Enhanced Quantum Metrology by Quenching Superradiant Light-Matter Systems
Karol Gietka, Lewis Ruks, Thomas Busch
Abstract
We present a quantum metrology protocol which relies on quenching a light-matter system exhibiting a superradiant quantum phase transition beyond its critical point. In the thermodynamic limit these systems can exhibit an exponential divergence of the quantum Fisher information in time, whose origin is the exponential growth of the number of correlated photons on an arbitrarily fast time scale determined by the coupling strength. This provides an exponential speed-up in the growth of the quantum Fisher information over existing critical quantum metrology protocols observing power law behaviour. We demonstrate that the Cramer-Rao bound can be saturated in our protocol through the standard homodyne detection scheme. We explicitly show its advantage in the archetypal setting of the Dicke model and explore a quantum gas coupled to a single-mode cavity field as a potential platform. In this case an additional exponential enhancement of the quantum Fisher information can in practice be observed with the number of atoms $N$ in the cavity, despite existing works suggesting a requirement of $N$-body coupling terms.