No Arabic abstract
Our 2005 Physical Review Letter entitled Suppression of Spin-Projection Noise in Broadband Atomic Magnetometry (volume 94, 203002) relied heavily in its claims of experimental quantum-limited performance on the results of a prior publication from our group [1]. In subsequent work we have determined that the results of [1] were incorrect and must therefore retract this Physical Review Letter as well. The authors would like to emphasize that the broadband magnetometry approach taken in our work remains valid, as described in the theoretical paper [2], but we have lost confidence in the calibration procedures employed at the time to establish sensitivity relative to the spin-projection noise level. [1] JM Geremia, John K. Stockton and Hideo Mabuchi, Real-Time Quantum Feedback Control of Atomic Spin-Squeezing, Science 304, 270, (2004). [2] John K. Stockton, JM Geremia, Andrew C. Doherty and Hideo Mabuchi, Robust quantum parameter estimation: Coherent magnetometry with feedback, Phys. Rev. A 69, 032109, (2004).
We provide a framework for understanding recent experiments on squeezing of a collective atomic pseudo-spin, induced by a homodyne measurement on off-resonant probe light interrogating the atoms. The detection of light decimates the atomic state distribution and we discuss the conditions under which the resulting reduced quantum fluctuations are metrologically relevant. In particular, we consider a dual probe scheme which benefits from a cancelation of classical common mode noise sources such that quantum fluctuations from light and atoms are the main contributions to the detected signal.
Atomic magnetometers are highly sensitive detectors of magnetic fields that monitor the evolution of the macroscopic magnetic moment of atomic vapors, and opening new applications in biological, physical, and chemical science. However, the performance of atomic magnetometers is often limited by hidden systematic effects that may cause misdiagnosis for a variety of applications, e.g., in NMR and in biomagnetism. In this work, we uncover a hitherto unexplained interference effect in atomic magnetometers, which causes an important systematic effect to greatly deteriorate the accuracy of measuring magnetic fields. We present a standard approach to detecting and characterizing the interference effect in, but not limited to, atomic magnetometers. As applications of our work, we consider the effect of the interference in NMR structural determination and locating the brain electrophysiological symptom, and show that it will help to improve the measurement accuracy by taking interference effects into account. Through our experiments, we indeed find good agreement between our prediction and the asymmetric amplitudes of resonant lines in ultralow-field NMR spectra -- an effect that has not been understood so far. We anticipate that our work will stimulate interesting new researches for magnetic interference phenomena in a wide range of magnetometers and their applications.
In this paper we describe that the optically pumped frequency standards can have frequency stability beyond the quantum noise limit by detecting the Ramsey resonance through the squeezed light. In this paper we report that instead of considering the interaction of entangled atoms in the microwave region, it will be more practical to create the entanglement of the atoms in the detection region using the squeezed light, which is also used for the detection of the Ramsey resonance. The advantage of squeezing can be derived when the technical noises have been removed.
We use a quantum non-demolition measurement to generate a spin squeezed state and to create entanglement in a cloud of 10^5 cold cesium atoms, and for the first time operate an atomic clock improved by spin squeezing beyond the projection noise limit in a proof-of-principle experiment. For a clock-interrogation time of 10 mus the experiments show an improvement of 1.1 dB in the signal-to-noise ratio, compared to the atomic projection noise limit.
Continuously monitored atomic spin-ensembles allow, in principle, for real-time sensing of external magnetic fields beyond classical limits. Within the linear-Gaussian regime, thanks to the phenomenon of measurement-induced spin-squeezing, they attain a quantum-enhanced scaling of sensitivity both as a function of time, $t$, and the number of atoms involved, $N$. In our work, we rigorously study how such conclusions based on Kalman filtering methods change when inevitable imperfections are taken into account: in the form of collective noise, as well as stochastic fluctuations of the field in time. We prove that even an infinitesimal amount of noise disallows the error to be arbitrarily diminished by simply increasing $N$, and forces it to eventually follow a classical-like behaviour in $t$. However, we also demonstrate that, thanks to the presence of noise, in most regimes the model based on a homodyne-like continuous measurement actually achieves the ultimate sensitivity allowed by the decoherence, yielding then the optimal quantum-enhancement. We are able to do so by constructing a noise-induced lower bound on the error that stems from a general method of classically simulating a noisy quantum evolution, during which the stochastic parameter to be estimated -- here, the magnetic field -- is encoded. The method naturally extends to schemes beyond the linear-Gaussian regime, in particular, also to ones involving feedback or active control.