No Arabic abstract
We study the role of bath-induced correlations in temperature estimation of cold Bosonic baths. Our protocol includes multiple probes, that are not interacting, nor are they initially correlated to each other. They interact with a Bosonic sample and reach a non-equilibrium steady state, which is measured to estimate the temperature of the sample. It is well-known that in the steady state such non-interacting probes may get correlated to each other and even entangled. Nonetheless, the impact of these correlations in metrology has not been deeply investigated yet. Here, we examine their role for thermometry of cold Bosonic gases and show that, although being classical, bath-induced correlations can indeed lead to sub-shot-noise precision for thermometry at low temperatures; e.g., for a probe of $30$ non-interacting impurities they can enhance the quantum Fisher information by two orders of magnitude. The proposed thermometry scheme here does not require precise dynamical control of the probes and tuning the parameters, as it is build upon the non-equilibrium steady state of a non-interacting system. Our results put forward new possibilities in thermometry at low temperatures, of relevance for instance in cold gases and Bose--Einstein condensates.
We demonstrate that a dispersive imaging technique based on the Faraday effect can measure the atom number in a large, ultracold atom cloud with a precision below the atom shot noise level. The minimally destructive character of the technique allows us to take multiple images of the same cloud, which enables sub-atom shot noise measurement precision of the atom number and allows for an in situ determination of the measurement precision. We have developed a noise model that quantitatively describes the noise contributions due to photon shot noise in the detected light and the noise associated with single atom loss. This model contains no free parameters and is calculated through an analysis of the fluctuations in the acquired images. For clouds containing $N sim 5 times 10^6$ atoms, we achieve a precision more than a factor of two below the atom shot noise level.
We derive a Lindblad master equation that approximates the dynamics of a Lipkin-Meshkov-Glick (LMG) model weakly coupled to a bosonic bath. By studying the time evolution of operators under the adjoint master equation we prove that, for large system sizes, these operators attain their thermal equilibrium expectation values in the long-time limit, and we calculate the rate at which these values are approached. Integrability of the LMG model prevents thermalization in the absence of a bath, and our work provides an explicit proof that the bath indeed restores thermalization. Imposing thermalization on this otherwise non-thermalizing model outlines an avenue towards probing the unconventional thermodynamic properties predicted to occur in ultracold-atom-based realizations of the LMG model.
As the minituarization of electronic devices, which are sensitive to temperature, grows apace, sensing of temperature with ever smaller probes is more important than ever. Genuinely quantum mechanical schemes of thermometry are thus expected to be crucial to future technological progress. We propose a new method to measure the temperature of a bath using the weak measurement scheme with a finite dimensional probe. The precision offered by the present scheme not only shows similar qualitative features as the usual Quantum Fisher Information based thermometric protocols, but also allows for flexibility over setting the optimal thermometric window through judicious choice of post selection measurements.
A Bose-Einstein condensate of ultracold atoms inside the field of a laser-driven optical cavity exhibits dispersive optical bistability. We describe this system by using mean-field approximation and by analyzing the correlation functions of the linearized quantum fluctuations around the mean-field solution. The entanglement and the statistics of the atom-field quadratures are given in the stationary state. It is shown that the mean-field solution, i.e. the Bose-Einstein condensate is robust against entanglement generation for most part of the phase diagram.
One of the challenges of quantum technologies is realising the quantum advantage, predicted for ideal systems, in real applications, which have to cope with decoherence and inefficiencies. In quantum metrology, sub-shot-noise imaging (SSNI) and sensing methods can provide genuine quantum enhancement in realistic situations. However, wide field SSNI schemes realized so far suffer a trade-off between the resolution and the sensitivity gain over classical counterpart: small pixels or integrating area, are necessary to achieve high imaging resolution, but larger pixels allow a better detection efficiency of quantum correlations, which means a larger quantum advantage. Here we show how the SSNI protocol can be optimized to significantly improve the resolution without giving up the quantum advantage in the sensitivity. We show a linear resolution improvement (up to a factor 3) with respect to the simple protocol used in previous demonstrations.