Abstract We study the impact of quantum correlations existing within the system-environment thermal equilibrium state while estimating the parameters of the spin reservoir. By employing various physical situations of interest, we present results for the reservoir temperature and its coupling strength with the central two-level system. The central system (probe) interacts with the bunch of randomly oriented spin systems and attains a thermal equilibrium state. We consider a projective measurement which prepares the probe’s initial state, and then the global system (probe and reservoir) evolves unitarily. The reduced density operator encapsulates the information about the spin reservoir which can be extracted by doing measurements on the probe. The precision of such measurement is quantified by quantum Fisher information. We repeat this process if the probe-reservoir initial state is not correlated (product state). We compare the estimation results for both with and without the outturn of initial correlations. In the temperature estimation case, our results are promising as one can significantly improve the accuracy of the estimates by including the effect of initial correlations. A similar trend prevails in the case of coupling strength estimation especially at low temperatures.
Abstract We study the impact of quantum correlations existing within the system-environment thermal equilibrium state while estimating the parameters of the spin reservoir. By employing various physical situations of interest, we present results for the reservoir temperature and its coupling strength with the central two-level system. The central system (probe) interacts with the bunch of randomly oriented spin systems and attains a thermal equilibrium state. We consider a projective measurement which prepares the probe’s initial state, and then the global system (probe and reservoir) evolves unitarily. The reduced density operator encapsulates the information about the spin reservoir which can be extracted by doing measurements on the probe. The precision of such measurement is quantified by quantum Fisher information. We repeat this process if the probe-reservoir initial state is not correlated (product state). We compare the estimation results for both with and without the outturn of initial correlations. In the temperature estimation case, our results are promising as one can significantly improve the accuracy of the estimates by including the effect of initial correlations. A similar trend prevails in the case of coupling strength estimation especially at low temperatures.
We investigate the effect of initial system-environment correlations to improve the estimation of environment parameters. By employing various physical situations of interest, we present results for the environment temperature and system-environment coupling strength. We consider the spin-spin model whereby a probe (a small controllable quantum system) interacts with a bath of quantum spins and attains a thermal equilibrium state. A projective measurement is then performed to prepare the initial state and allow it to evolve unitarily. The properties of the environment are imprinted upon the dynamics of the probe. The reduced density matrix of the probe state contains a modified decoherence factor and dissipation. This additional factor acts in such a way to improve the estimation of the environment parameters, as quantified by the quantum Fisher information (QFI). In the temperature estimation case, our results are promising as one can improve the precision of the estimates by orders of magnitude by incorporating the effect of initial correlations. The precision increases in the strong coupling regime even if the nearest neighbours' interaction is taken into account. In the case of coupling strength, interestingly the accuracy was found to be continuously increasing in both with and without correlations cases. More importantly, one can see the noticeable role of correlations in improving precision, especially at low temperatures.
Abstract Projective measurement is a popular method of initial state preparation, which always prepares a pure state. However, in various physical situations of interest, this selective measurement becomes unrealistic. In this paper, we investigate the role of pulsed measurement (a unitary operation) on the estimation of system-environment parameters and compare the estimation results obtained via projective measurement with the results obtained via unitary operation. We argue that in typical situations, parameters can be estimated with higher accuracy if the initial state is prepared with the unitary operator (a pulse). We consider the spin-spin model in which a central two-level system (probe) interacts with a collection of two-level systems (bath). The probe interacts with the bath and attains thermal equilibrium. Then, via unitary operation, the initial state is prepared which evolves unitarily. The properties of the bath are imprinted on the reduced dynamics. Due to the initial probe-bath correlations present in the thermal equilibrium state, an additional factor arises in the dynamics, which has an important role in the parameter estimation. In this paper, we study the estimation of bath temperature and probe-bath coupling strength which is quantified by the quantum Fisher information. Our results are promising as one can improve the precision of the estimates by orders of magnitude (especially in the coupling strength case) via unitary operation and by incorporating the effect of initial correlations.
We study how a second qubit can improve the estimation of spin-environment parameters when only one of the two qubits is measured. Both qubits are coupled to a common spin bath through the exactly solvable central-spin model, in which populations and coherences both evolve. Because the bath operator coupled to the qubits commutes with the bath Hamiltonian, the environment induces no effective interaction between the qubits. Without initial correlations or direct inter-qubit coupling, the two-qubit probe therefore performs exactly like a single qubit. When initial system-environment correlations are included, preparing the second qubit reshapes the environment statistics in a parameter-dependent way, and the measured qubit reads out this imprint. This improves the quantum Fisher information (QFI) for the coupling strength by factors of 3-4 relative to a correlated single-qubit probe, and by more than an order of magnitude relative to an uncorrelated one. For temperature estimation, the improvement reaches a factor of about 8. A direct Ising coupling does not help by itself, but the advantage persists in its presence. We also derive the classical Fisher information for arbitrary projective measurements and identify the measurement that saturates the QFI, which in general lies out of the equatorial plane of the Bloch sphere.
We investigate the role of non-selective measurement on the estimation of system-environment parameters. Projective measurement is the popular method of initial state preparation which always prepares a pure state. However, in various physical situations of physical interest, this selective measurement becomes unrealistic. In this paper, we compare the estimation results obtained via projective measurement with the results obtained via unitary operation. We argue that in typical situations, parameters can be estimated with higher accuracy if the initial state is prepared with the unitary operator (a pulse). We consider the spin-spin model where a central two-level system (probe) interacts with the collections of two-level systems (bath). A probe interacts with a bath and attains a thermal equilibrium state, then via unitary operation, the initial state is prepared which evolves unitarily. The properties of the bath are imprinted on the reduced dynamics. Due to the initial probe-bath correlations present in the thermal equilibrium state, an additional factor arises in the dynamics which has a phenomenal role in the parameter estimation. In this paper, we study the estimation of bath temperature and probe-bath coupling strength which is quantified by the quantum Fisher information. Our results are promising as one can improve the precision of the estimates by orders of magnitude via non-selective measurement and by incorporating the effect of initial correlations.
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.
Abstract We investigate the effect of the initial probe-environment correlations in estimating environment parameters. The probe constructed by two qubits, i.e. the two-qubit probe, is coupled with separate bosonic reservoirs and prepared in the product state. With the initial probe-environment correlations, we derive the analytic quantum Fisher information (QFI) and the corresponding quantum signal-to-noise ratio (QSNR) to quantify the estimation accuracy of environment parameters. The QFI and the QSNR increase when estimating cut-off frequency, coupling strength, and temperature, respectively, demonstrating that the initial probe-environment correlations can be used to improve the accuracy of estimating the environment parameters in the estimation scheme of two-qubit probes.