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arXiv:quant-ph/0412078 · Science

Quantum-Enhanced Measurements: Beating the Standard Quantum Limit

Vittorio Giovannetti, Seth Lloyd, Lorenzo Maccone

Published Nov 18, 2004• 3,046 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Quantum mechanics, through the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, imposes limits on the precision of measurement. Conventional measurement techniques typically fail to reach these limits. Conventional bounds to the precision of measurements such as the shot noise limit or the standard quantum limit are not as fundamental as the Heisenberg limits and can be beaten using quantum strategies that employ "quantum tricks" such as squeezing and entanglement.

DOI
10.1126/science.1104149

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Quantum mechanics, through the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, imposes limits on the precision of measurement. Conventional measurement techniques typically fail to reach these limits. Conventional bounds to the precision of measurements such as the shot noise limit or the standard quantum limit are not as fundamental as the Heisenberg limits and can be beaten using quantum strategies that employ "quantum tricks" such as squeezing and entanglement.
Weak measurements have been under intensive investigation in both experiment and theory. Numerous experiments have indicated that the amplified meter shift is produced by the post-selection, yielding an improved precision compared to conventional methods. However, this amplification effect comes at the cost of a reduced rate of acquiring data, which leads to an increasing uncertainty to determine the level of meter shift. From this point of view, a number of theoretical works have suggested that weak measurements cannot improve the precision, or even damage the metrology information due to the post-selection. In this review, we give a comprehensive analysis of the weak measurements to justify their positive effect on prompting measurement precision. As a further step, we introduce two modified weak measurement protocols to boost the precision beyond the standard quantum limit. Compared to previous works beating the standard quantum limit, these protocols are free of using entangled or squeezed states. The achieved precision outperforms that of the conventional method by two orders of magnitude and attains a practical Heisenberg scaling up to n=106 photons.
Quantum-enhanced measurements use highly non-classical quantum states in order to enhance the precision of the measurement of classical quantities, like the length of an optical cavity. The major goal is to beat the standard quantum limit (SQL), i.e. a precision of order 1/N1/\sqrt{N}1/N​, where NNN is the number of quantum resources (e.g. the number of photons or atoms used), and to achieve a scaling 1/N1/N1/N, known as the Heisenberg limit. Doing so would have tremendous impact in many areas, but so far only three experiments have demonstrated a slight improvement over the SQL. The required quantum states are generally difficult to produce, and very prone to decoherence. Here we show that decoherence itself may be used as an extremely sensitive probe of system properties. This should allow for a new measurement principle with the potential to achieve the Heisenberg limit without the need to produce highly entangled states.
Entanglement-enhanced quantum metrology explores the utilization of quantum entanglement to enhance measurement precision. When particles in a probe are prepared into a suitable quantum entangled state, they may collectively accumulate information about the physical quantity to be measured, leading to an improvement in measurement precision beyond the standard quantum limit and approaching the Heisenberg limit. The rapid advancement of techniques for quantum manipulation and detection has enabled the generation, manipulation, and detection of multi-particle entangled states in synthetic quantum systems such as cold atoms and trapped ions. This article aims to review and illustrate the fundamental principles and experimental progresses that demonstrate multi-particle entanglement for quantum metrology, as well as discuss the potential applications of entanglement-enhanced quantum sensors.
While it is true that quantum mechanics imposes strict limits on the precision of measurements, we can sometimes improve measurement precision without violating the uncertainty principle. The rub is that this improvement may be formidable to achieve in practice—and always comes at the expense of a loss in the precision of a complementary measurement. Last October a team at AT&T Bell Labs succeeded in reducing the noise observed from an optical cavity below the “shot noise”—the level of fluctuations associated with variations in the vacuum fields, which is the ultimate limit to accuracy that would be predicted by semiclassical models. Although the Bell Labs experiment reduced the noise below this level by only 7 to 10%, it bolstered hopes that continued progress might eventually yield reductions in noise by factors of ten. Manipulation of the quantum noise limitations might be absolutely critical to such precision measurements as detection of gravity waves, whose faint signals are likely to be near the measurement limit of laser interferometers or mechanical oscillators. The phenomenon might possibly find applications in optical communication or optical memory systems.
It is well known that classical states of light exhibit shot noise, characteristic of independent or uncorrelated particles. For phase estimation problems, this leads to a shot-noise limited uncertainty of 1/sqrt[N], where N is the number of particles detected. It is also well known that the shot-noise limit is not fundamental: squeezed states and entangled states can be used for sub-shot-noise phase measurements. The uncertainty principle sets a fundamental limit of 1/N, known as the "Heisenberg" limit. We have recently demonstrated a method, using parametric downconversion and post-selection, to generate entangled "NOON" states suitable for sub-shot-noise phase measurements [M.W. Mitchell et al, Nature 429, 161 (2004)]. We generated a three-photon NOON state and demonstrated three-fold improvement in phase resolution with this state. The relationship between phase resolution and phase uncertainty depends on prior information about the phase being estimated. As in the case of phase measurements with squeezed states, extra precision in one dimension is gained at the cost of reduced precision in other dimensions. Only when prior information is incorporated can entangled-state metrology be applied to beat the shot-noise limit. We illustrate this relationship and discuss adaptive strategies for phase estimation and the possibility of reaching the Heisenberg limit.
Quantum precision enhancement is of fundamental importance for the development of advanced metrological optical experiments, such as gravitational wave detection and frequency calibration with atomic clocks. Precision in these experiments is strongly limited by the 1/√N shot noise factor with N being the number of probes (photons, atoms) employed in the experiment. Quantum theory provides tools to overcome the bound by using entangled probes. In an idealized scenario this gives rise to the Heisenberg scaling of precision 1/N. Here we show that when decoherence is taken into account, the maximal possible quantum enhancement in the asymptotic limit of infinite N amounts generically to a constant factor rather than quadratic improvement. We provide efficient and intuitive tools for deriving the bounds based on the geometry of quantum channels and semi-definite programming. We apply these tools to derive bounds for models of decoherence relevant for metrological applications including: depolarization, dephasing, spontaneous emission and photon loss. Quantum metrology employs the properties of quantum states to further enhance the accuracy of some of the most precise measurement schemes to date. Here, a method for estimating the upper bounds to achievable precision in quantum-enhanced metrology protocols in the presence of decoherence is presented.