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We show that both the classical as well as the quantum definitions of the Fisher information faithfully identify resourceful quantum states in general quantum resource theories, in the sense that they can always distinguish between states with and without a given resource. This shows that all quantum resources confer an advantage in metrology, and establishes the Fisher information as a universal tool to probe the resourcefulness of quantum states. We provide bounds on the extent of this advantage, as well as a simple criterion to test whether different resources are useful for the estimation of unitarily encoded parameters. Finally, we extend the results to show that the Fisher information is also able to identify the dynamical resourcefulness of quantum operations.
The Quantum Fisher Information (QFI) plays a crucial role in quantum information theory and in many practical applications such as quantum metrology. However, computing the QFI is generally a computationally demanding task. In this work we analyze a lower bound on the QFI which we call the sub-Quantum Fisher Information (sub-QFI). The bound can be efficiently estimated on a quantum computer for an $n$-qubit state using $2n$ qubits. The sub-QFI is based on the super-fidelity, an upper bound on Uhlmanns fidelity. We analyze the sub-QFI in the context of unitary families, where we derive several crucial properties including its geometrical interpretation. In particular, we prove that the QFI and the sub-QFI are maximized for the same optimal state, which implies that the sub-QFI is faithful to the QFI in the sense that both quantities share the same global extrema. Based on this faithfulness, the sub-QFI acts as an efficiently computable surrogate for the QFI for quantum sensing and quantum metrology applications. Finally, we provide additional meaning to the sub-QFI as a measure of coherence, asymmetry, and purity loss.
In recent proposals for achieving optical super-resolution, variants of the Quantum Fisher Information (QFI) quantify the attainable precision. We find that claims about a strong enhancement of the resolution resulting from coherence effects are questionable because they refer to very small subsets of the data without proper normalization. When the QFI is normalized, accounting for the strength of the signal, there is no advantage of coherent sources over incoherent ones. Our findings have a bearing on further studies of the achievable precision of optical instruments.
We introduce and analyse the problem of encoding classical information into different resources of a quantum state. More precisely, we consider a general class of communication scenarios characterised by encoding operations that commute with a unique resource destroying map and leave free states invariant. Our motivating example is given by encoding information into coherences of a quantum system with respect to a fixed basis (with unitaries diagonal in that basis as encodings and the decoherence channel as a resource destroying map), but the generality of the framework allows us to explore applications ranging from super-dense coding to thermodynamics. For any state, we find that the number of messages that can be encoded into it using such operations in a one-shot scenario is upper-bounded in terms of the information spectrum relative entropy between the given state and its version with erased resources. Furthermore, if the resource destroying map is a twirling channel over some unitary group, we find matching one-shot lower-bounds as well. In the asymptotic setting where we encode into many copies of the resource state, our bounds yield an operational interpretation of resource monotones such as the relative entropy of coherence and its corresponding relative entropy variance.
In estimating an unknown parameter of a quantum state the quantum Fisher information (QFI) is a pivotal quantity, which depends on the state and its derivate with respect to the unknown parameter. We prove the continuity property for the QFI in the sense that two close states with close first derivatives have close QFIs. This property is completely general and irrespective of dynamics or how states acquire their parameter dependence and also the form of parameter dependence---indeed this continuity is basically a feature of the classical Fisher information that in the case of the QFI naturally carries over from the manifold of probability distributions onto the manifold of density matrices. We demonstrate that in the special case where the dependence of the states on the unknown parameter comes from one dynamical map (quantum channel), the continuity holds in its reduced form with respect to the initial states. In addition, we show that when one initial state evolves through two different quantum channels, the continuity relation applies in its general form. A situation in which such scenario can occur is an open-system metrology where one of the maps represents the ideal dynamics whereas the other map represents the real (noisy) dynamics. In the making of our main result, we also introduce a regularized representation for the symmetric logarithmic derivative which works for general states even with incomplete rank, and its features continuity similarly to the QFI.
This review aims at gathering the most relevant quantum multi-parameter estimation methods that go beyond the direct use of the Quantum Fisher Information concept. We discuss in detail the Holevo Cramer-Rao bound, the Quantum Local Asymptotic Normality approach as well as Bayesian methods. Even though the fundamental concepts in the field have been laid out more than forty years ago, a number of important results have appeared much more recently. Moreover, the field drew increased attention recently thanks to advances in practical quantum metrology proposals and implementations that often involve estimation of multiple parameters simultaneously. Since these topics are spread in the literature and often served in a very formal mathematical language, one of the main goals of this review is to provide a largely self-contained work that allows the reader to follow most of the derivations and get an intuitive understanding of the interrelations between different concepts using a set of simple yet representative examples involving qubit and Gaussian shift models.