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Physical Review A

Quantum illumination strategy for parameter estimation

L. Davidovich, R. L. de Matos Filho

Published Oct 19, 2023• 1 citation
Publisher

Abstract

Establishing the limits of precision in the estimation of parameters for noisy quantum channels probed by qubits is important for many areas of quantum information, such as quantum sensing, computation, and communication. Here we consider the estimation of parameters characterizing a general class of noisy Pauli channels. We show that two entangled qubits, such that only one of them probes the channel, may lead, under an entangling measurement, to strong enhancement of the precision in the estimation, as compared to the precision corresponding to sending the pair, entangled or not, through the channel. We prove that entanglement plays an essential role, as does the entangling detection procedure, consisting in projecting the final state onto a Bell-state basis. We also prove that quantum advantage is obtained only when the output state, after interaction with the sample, is not entangled anymore. This behavior has striking similarities with quantum illumination, where initial entanglement of probe and ancilla beams, followed by an entangling measurement, lead to enhancement of the sensitivity of photodetection, even after the output beams are disentangled. Similarities and differences with ghost imaging are also discussed.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.108.042612

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Establishing the limits of precision in the estimation of parameters for noisy quantum channels probed by qubits is important for many areas of quantum information, such as quantum sensing, computation, and communication. Here we consider the estimation of parameters characterizing a general class of noisy Pauli channels. We show that two entangled qubits, such that only one of them probes the channel, may lead, under an entangling measurement, to strong enhancement of the precision in the estimation, as compared to the precision corresponding to sending the pair, entangled or not, through the channel. We prove that entanglement plays an essential role, as does the entangling detection procedure, consisting in projecting the final state onto a Bell-state basis. We also prove that quantum advantage is obtained only when the output state, after interaction with the sample, is not entangled anymore. This behavior has striking similarities with quantum illumination, where initial entanglement of probe and ancilla beams, followed by an entangling measurement, lead to enhancement of the sensitivity of photodetection, even after the output beams are disentangled. Similarities and differences with ghost imaging are also discussed.
We show that the strategy of ghost imaging can be successfully adapted to the estimation of parameters of open systems. Two entangled qubits, so that only one of them interacts with a depolarizing sample, may lead to precision in the estimation of the depolarizing parameter better than the one corresponding to sending the pair, entangled or not, through the sample. As opposed to ghost imaging, entanglement plays an essential role in this case, as does the entangling detection procedure, consisting in projecting the final state on a Bell-state basis. For isotropic depolarization, quantum advantage is obtained only when the final state, after interaction with the sample, is not entangled anymore.
This work compares the performance of single- and two-qubit probes for estimating several phase rotations simultaneously under the action of different noisy channels. We compute the quantum limits for this simultaneous estimation using collective and individual measurements by evaluating the Holevo and Nagaoka-Hayashi Cramér-Rao bounds, respectively. Several quantum noise channels are considered, namely the decohering channel, the amplitude damping channel, and the phase damping channel. For each channel, we find the optimal single- and two-qubit probes. Where possible we demonstrate an explicit measurement strategy that saturates the appropriate bound and we investigate how closely the Holevo bound can be approached through collective measurements on multiple copies of the same probe. We find that under the action of the considered channels, two-qubit probes show enhanced parameter estimation capabilities over single-qubit probes for almost all non-identity channels, i.e., the achievable precision with a single-qubit probe degrades faster with increasing exposure to the noisy environment than that of the two-qubit probe. However, in sufficiently noisy channels, we show that it is possible for single-qubit probes to outperform maximally entangled two-qubit probes. This work shows that, in order to reach the ultimate precision limits allowed by quantum mechanics, entanglement is required in both the state preparation and state measurement stages. It is hoped the tutorial-esque nature of this paper will make it easily accessible.
Sensing and measurement tasks in severely adverse conditions such as loss, noise, and dephasing can be improved by illumination with quantum states of light. Previous results have shown a modest reduction in the number of measurements necessary to achieve a given precision. Here, we compare three illumination strategies for estimating the relative phase in a noisy, lossy interferometer. When including a common phase fluctuation in the noise processes, we show that using an entangled probe achieves an advantage in parameter estimation precision that scales with the number of entangled modes. This work provides a theoretical foundation for the use of highly multimode entangled states of light for practical measurement tasks in experimentally challenging conditions.
We show that entangled measurements provide an exponential advantage in sample complexity for Pauli channel estimation, which is both a fundamental problem and a practically important subroutine for benchmarking near-term quantum devices. The specific task we consider is to simultaneously learn all the eigenvalues of an nnn-qubit Pauli channel to $\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}\ensuremath{\varepsilon}$ precision. We give an estimation protocol with an nnn-qubit ancilla that succeeds with high probability using only $O(n/{\ensuremath{\varepsilon}}^{2})$ copies of the Pauli channel, while proving that any ancilla-free protocol (possibly with adaptive control and channel concatenation) would need at least $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Omega}}({2}^{n/3})$ rounds of measurement. We further study the advantages provided by a small number of ancillas. For the case that a kkk-qubit ancilla ($k\ensuremath{\le}n$) is available, we obtain a sample complexity lower bound of $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Omega}}({2}^{(n\ensuremath{-}k)/3})$ for any nonconcatenating protocol, and a stronger lower bound of $\mathrm{\ensuremath{\Omega}}(n{2}^{n\ensuremath{-}k})$ for any nonadaptive, nonconcatenating protocol, which is shown to be tight. We also show how to apply the ancilla-assisted estimation protocol to a practical quantum benchmarking task in a noise-resilient and sample-efficient manner, given reasonable noise assumptions. Our results provide a practically interesting example for quantum advantages in learning and also bring insights for quantum benchmarking.
This thesis explores various protocols which can be applied to quantum metrology, such that precision of the measurement can beat the best classical approaches. We first demonstrate that ancilla-assisted schemes can improve phase estimation in the presence of noise, and we propose an experiment to demonstrate these effects. Given that the use of ancillae helps, it is no surprise that there are noisy channels for which the optimal strategy may depend on the noise level. We show that there is a non-trivial crossover between the ancilla-assisted strategy and the parallel-entangled strategy for Pauli noise channels and the amplitude damping channel. We see that under certain circumstances, the environment cannot access the parameter of interest. We then integrated techniques from quantum communication, to derive a general framework that renders quantum metrology protocols into cryptographic ones. Here the protocol is unconditionally secure if the trusted parties wish only to achieve the standard quantum limit. If Heisenberg-limited precision is to be achieved, they sacrifice some security, where adversaries can access information, but only at the risk of getting caught at it (cheat-sensitivity). In many scenarios, the quantum Fisher information is achieved for only one value of the phase. In a particular phase estimation scheme that measures the parity at the output of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer where the input is a two-mode squeezed vacuum, this problem is particularly imminent. We apply an adaptive technique to resolve this issue, showing that one can achieve precisions substantially below the shot noise limit. The key to a quadratically enhanced improvement in quantum metrology is entanglement. Finally, we demonstrate in a photonic system how high-dimensional entanglement can be certified, and provide an alternate interpretation of entanglement from an information-theoretic perspective.
A generic qubit unitary operator affected by quantum noise is duplicated and inserted in a coherently superposed channel, superposing two paths offered to a probe qubit across the noisy unitary, and driven by a control qubit. A characterization is performed of the transformation realized by the superposed channel on the joint state of the probe-control qubit pair. The superposed channel is then specifically analyzed for the fundamental metrological task of phase estimation on the noisy unitary, with the performance assessed by the Fisher information, classical or quantum. A comparison is made with conventional estimation techniques and also with a quantum switched channel with indefinite causal order recently investigated for a similar task of phase estimation. In the analysis here, a first important observation is that the control qubit of the superposed channel, although it never directly interacts with the unitary being estimated, can nevertheless be measured alone for effective estimation, while discarding the probe qubit that interacts with the unitary. This property is also present with the switched channel but is inaccessible with conventional techniques. The optimal measurement of the control qubit here is characterized in general conditions. A second important observation is that the noise plays an essential role in coupling the control qubit to the unitary, and that the control qubit remains operative for phase estimation at very strong noise, even with a fully depolarizing noise, whereas conventional estimation and the switched channel become inoperative in these conditions. The results extend the analysis of the capabilities of coherently controlled channels which represent novel devices exploitable for quantum signal and information processing.