The use of squeezing and entanglement allows advanced interferometers to detect signals that would otherwise be buried in quantum mechanical noise. High sensitivity instruments including magnetometers and gravitational wave detectors have shown enhanced signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by injecting single-mode squeezed light into SU(2) interferometers, e.g. the Mach-Zehnder or Michelson topologies. The quantum enhancement in this approach is sensitive to losses, which break the fragile quantum correlations in the squeezed state. In contrast, SU(1,1) interferometers achieve quantum enhancement by noiseless amplification; they noiselessly increase the signal rather than reducing the quantum noise. Prior work on SU(1,1) interferometers has shown quantum-enhanced SNR11 and insensitivity to losses but to date has been limited to low powers and thus low SNR. Here we introduce a new interferometer topology, the SU(2)-in-SU(1,1) nested interferometer, that combines quantum enhancement, the high SNR possible with a SU(2) interferometer, and the loss tolerance of the SU(1,1) approach. We implement this interferometer using four-wave mixing in a hot atomic vapor and demonstrate 2:2(5) dB of quantum SNR enhancement, in a system with a phase variance nearly two orders of magnitude below that of any previous loss-tolerant enhancement scheme. The new interferometer enables new possibilities such as beyond-shot-noise sensing with wavelengths for which efficient detectors are not available.
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