Quantum phase estimation with lossy interferometers

By Rafal Demkowicz-Dobrzanski, U. Dorner, Brian J. Smith, Jeff S. Lundeen, Wojciech Wasilewski, K. Banaszek, I. Walmsley. 2009

241 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We give a detailed discussion of optimal quantum states for optical two-mode interferometry in the presence of photon losses. We derive analytical formulae for the precision of phase estimation obtainable using quantum states of light with a definite photon number and prove that maximization of the precision is a convex optimization problem. The corresponding optimal precision, i.e., the lowest possible uncertainty, is shown to beat the standard quantum limit thus outperforming classical interferometry. Furthermore, we discuss more general inputs: states with indefinite photon number and states with photons distributed between distinguishable time bins. We prove that neither of these is helpful in improving phase estimation precision.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c1486f7612d17592bf2594a116f05366e6e5080f

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In Artificial Intelligence

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

Citations in the corpus

Experimental quantum-enhanced estimation of a lossy phase shift (2009, background): “For a lossy phase shift, it is necessary to readjust the splitting ratio for the input light which yields a generalized bound on precision [19] in the form of the standard interferometric limit (SIL).”
Advances in quantum metrology (2011, methodology): “Nonetheless, the shot noise can be beaten [103] and the optimal states to do so in the presence of loss have been calculated numerically using various optimization techniques for fixed number of input photons [104, 105] and for photon-number detection [106].”
General framework for estimating the ultimate precision limit in noisy quantum-enhanced metrology (2011, background): “Numerical limits for the minimum uncertainty in the measurement of the phase shift, when either one or both arms of an interferometer are subject to photon losses, were found in [16, 17] for input states with fixed photon numbers.”