No Arabic abstract
Over the past 20 years, bright sources of entangled photons have led to a renaissance in quantum optical interferometry. Optical interferometry has been used to test the foundations of quantum mechanics and implement some of the novel ideas associated with quantum entanglement such as quantum teleportation, quantum cryptography, quantum lithography, quantum computing logic gates, and quantum metrology. In this paper, we focus on the new ways that have been developed to exploit quantum optical entanglement in quantum metrology to beat the shot-noise limit, which can be used, e.g., in fiber optical gyroscopes and in sensors for biological or chemical targets. We also discuss how this entanglement can be used to beat the Rayleigh diffraction limit in imaging systems such as in LIDAR and optical lithography.
We propose a class of path-entangled photon Fock states for robust quantum optical metrology, imaging, and sensing in the presence of loss. We model propagation loss with beam-splitters and derive a reduced density matrix formalism from which we examine how photon loss affects coherence. It is shown that particular entangled number states, which contain a special superposition of photons in both arms of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, are resilient to environmental decoherence. We demonstrate an order of magnitude greater visibility with loss, than possible with N00N states. We also show that the effectiveness of a detection scheme is related to super-resolution visibility.
The study of optical parametric amplifiers (OPAs) has been successful in describing and creating nonclassical light for use in fields such as quantum metrology and quantum lithography [Agarwal, et al., J. Opt. Soc. Am. B, 24, 2 (2007)]. In this paper we present the theory of an OPA scheme utilizing an entangled state input. The scheme involves two identical OPAs seeded with the maximally path-entangled N00N state (|2,0>+|0,2>)/sqrt{2}. The stimulated amplification results in output state probability amplitudes that have a dependence on the number of photons in each mode, which differs greatly from two-mode squeezed vacuum. The output contains a family of entangled states directly applicable to quantum key distribution. Specific output states allow for the heralded creation of N=4 N00N states, which may be used for quantum lithography, to write sub-Rayleigh fringe patterns, and for quantum interferometry, to achieve Heisenberg-limited phase measurement sensitivity.
It has been proposed and demonstrated that path-entangled Fock states (PEFSs) are robust against photon loss over NOON states [S. D. Huver emph{et al.}, Phys. Rev. A textbf{78}, 063828 (2008)]. However, the demonstration was based on a measurement scheme which was yet to be implemented in experiments. In this work, we quantitatively illustrate the advantage of PEFSs over NOON states in the presence of photon losses by analytically calculating the quantum Fisher information. To realize such an advantage in practice, we then investigate the achievable sensitivities by employing three types of feasible measurements: parity, photon-number-resolving, and homodyne measurements. We here apply a double-port measurement strategy where the photons at each output port of the interferometer are simultaneously detected with the aforementioned types of measurements.
We investigate the utility of parity detection to achieve Heisenberg-limited phase estimation for optical interferometry. We consider the parity detection with several input states that have been shown to exhibit sub shot-noise interferometry with their respective detection schemes. We show that with parity detection, all these states achieve the sub-shot noise limited phase estimate. Thus making the parity detection a unified detection strategy for quantum optical metrology. We also consider quantum states that are a combination of a NOON states and a dual-Fock state, which gives a great deal of freedom in the preparation of the input state, and is found to surpass the shot-noise limit.
The extraordinary sensitivity of the output field of an optical cavity to small quantum-scale displacements has led to breakthroughs such as the first detection of gravitational waves cite{LIGO,LIGODC} and of the motions of quantum ground-state cooled mechanical oscillators cite{Teufel2011,Chan2011}. While heterodyne detection of the cavity field preserves asymmetries which provide a key signature that mechanical oscillators has attained the quantum regime, detection of a rotating quadrature of the light averages out important quantum correlations, yielding a weaker signal and lower sensitivity than homodyne detection. In turn, homodyning, detects a single optical quadrature, but loses the important quantum sideband asymmetries. In the present work we present and experimentally demonstrate a technique, involving judicious construction of the autocorrelators of the output current using filter functions, which can restore the lost correlations (whether classical or quantum), drastically augmenting the useful information extracted: the filtering adjusts for moderate errors in the locking phase of the local oscillator, allowing efficient single-shot measurement of hundreds of different field quadratures and rapid mapping of detailed features from a simple heterodyne trace. One may also control whether the correlations are recovered in isolation or interfere with the usual stationary heterodyne sidebands. In the latter case we obtain a spectrum of hybrid homodyne-heterodyne character, with motional sidebands of combined amplitudes comparable to homodyne. We term such recovery of lost heterodyne correlations with filter functions r-heterodyning: although investigated here in a thermal regime, its robustness and generality represents a promising new approach to sensing of quantum-scale displacements.