No Arabic abstract
Photonic states with large and fixed photon numbers, such as Fock states, enable quantum-enhanced metrology but remain an experimentally elusive resource. A potentially simple, deterministic and scalable way to generate these states consists of fully exciting $N$ quantum emitters equally coupled to a common photonic reservoir, which leads to a collective decay known as Dicke superradiance. The emitted $N$-photon state turns out to be a highly entangled multimode state, and to characterise its metrological properties in this work we: (i) develop theoretical tools to compute the Quantum Fisher Information of general multimode photonic states; (ii) use it to show that Dicke superradiant photons in 1D waveguides achieve Heisenberg scaling, which can be saturated by a parity measurement; (iii) and study the robustness of these states to experimental limitations in state-of-art atom-waveguide QED setups.
Quantum Metrology is one of the most promising application of quantum technologies. The aim of this research field is the estimation of unknown parameters exploiting quantum resources, whose application can lead to enhanced performances with respect to classical strategies. Several physical quantum systems can be employed to develop quantum sensors, and photonic systems represent ideal probes for a large number of metrological tasks. Here we review the basic concepts behind quantum metrology and then focus on the application of photonic technology for this task, with particular attention to phase estimation. We describe the current state of the art in the field in terms of platforms and quantum resources. Furthermore, we present the research area of multiparameter quantum metrology, where multiple parameters have to be estimated at the same time. We conclude by discussing the current experimental and theoretical challenges, and the open questions towards implementation of photonic quantum sensors with quantum-enhanced performances in the presence of noise.
Quantum enhancements of precision in metrology can be compromised by system imperfections. These may be mitigated by appropriate optimization of the input state to render it robust, at the expense of making the state difficult to prepare. In this paper, we identify the major sources of imperfection an optical sensor: input state preparation inefficiency, sensor losses, and detector inefficiency. The second of these has received much attention; we show that it is the least damaging to surpassing the standard quantum limit in a optical interferometric sensor. Further, we show that photonic states that can be prepared in the laboratory using feasible resources allow a measurement strategy using photon-number-resolving detectors that not only attains the Heisenberg limit for phase estimation in the absence of losses, but also deliver close to the maximum possible precision in realistic scenarios including losses and inefficiencies. In particular, we give bounds for the trade off between the three sources of imperfection that will allow true quantum-enhanced optical metrology.
We introduce a super-sensitive phase measurement technique that yields the Heisenberg limit without using either a squeezed state or a many-particle entangled state. Instead, we use a many-particle separable quantum state to probe the phase and we then retrieve the phase through single-particle interference. The particles that physically probe the phase are never detected. Our scheme involves no coincidence measurement or many-particle interference and yet exhibits phase super-resolution. We also analyze in detail how the loss of probing particles affects the measurement sensitivity and find that the loss results in the generation of many-particle entanglement and the reduction of measurement sensitivity. When the loss is maximum, the system produces a many-particle Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state, and the phase measurement becomes impossible due to very high phase uncertainty. In striking contrast to the super-sensitive phase measurement techniques that use entanglement involving two or more particles as a key resource, our method shows that having many-particle entanglement can be counterproductive in quantum metrology.
Quantum states superposed across multiple particles or degrees of freedom are of crucial importance for the development of quantum technologies. Creating these states deterministically and with high effciency is an ongoing challenge. A promising approach is the repeated excitation of multi-level quantum emitters, which have been shown to naturally generate light with quantum statistics. Here we describe how to create one class of higher dimensional quantum state, a so called W-state, which is superposed across multiple time bins. We do this by repeated Raman scattering of photons from a charged quantum dot in a pillar microcavity. We show this method can be scaled to larger dimensions with no reduction in coherence or single photon character. We explain how to extend this work to enable the deterministic creation of arbitrary time-bin encoded qudits.
Quantum technologies exploit entanglement to revolutionize computing, measurements, and communications. This has stimulated the research in different areas of physics to engineer and manipulate fragile many-particle entangled states. Progress has been particularly rapid for atoms. Thanks to the large and tunable nonlinearities and the well developed techniques for trapping, controlling and counting, many groundbreaking experiments have demonstrated the generation of entangled states of trapped ions, cold and ultracold gases of neutral atoms. Moreover, atoms can couple strongly to external forces and light fields, which makes them ideal for ultra-precise sensing and time keeping. All these factors call for generating non-classical atomic states designed for phase estimation in atomic clocks and atom interferometers, exploiting many-body entanglement to increase the sensitivity of precision measurements. The goal of this article is to review and illustrate the theory and the experiments with atomic ensembles that have demonstrated many-particle entanglement and quantum-enhanced metrology.