Search for: All records

Interactions among sensors can provide, in addition to entanglement, an important resource for boosting the precision in quantum estimation protocols. Dephasing noise, however, remains a leading source of decoherence in state-of-the-art quantum sensing platforms. We analyze the impact of classical collective dephasing with arbitrary temporal correlations on the performance of generalized Ramsey interferometry protocols with quadratic encoding of a target frequency parameter. The optimal asymptotic precision bounds are derived for both product coherent spin states and a class of experimentally relevant entangled spin-squeezed states of N qubit sensors. While, as in linear metrology, entanglement offers no advantage if the noise is Markovian, a precision scaling of N−1 is reachable with classical input states in the quadratic setting, which is improved to N−5/4 when temporal correlations are present and the Zeno regime is accessible. The use of nonclassical spin-squeezed states and a nonlinear readout further allows for an N−3/2 precision scaling, which we prove is asymptotically optimal. We also show how to counter noise-induced bias by introducing a simple ratio estimator, which relies on detecting two suitable system observables, and we show that it remains asymptotically unbiased in the presence of dephasing, without detriment to the achievable precision. 

Abstract We study the estimation precision attainable by entanglement-enhanced Ramsey interferometry in the presence of spatiotemporally correlated non-classical noise. Our analysis relies on an exact expression of the reduced density matrix of the qubit probes under general zero-mean Gaussian stationary dephasing, which is established through cumulant-expansion techniques and may be of independent interest in the context of non-Markovian open dynamics. By continuing and expanding our previous work (Beaudoinet al2018Phys. Rev.A98020102(R)), we analyze the effects of anon-collectivecoupling regime between the qubit probes and their environment, focusing on two limiting scenarios where the couplings may take only two or a continuum of possible values. In the paradigmatic case of spin–boson dephasing noise from a thermal environment, we find that it is in principle possible to suppress,on average, the effect of spatial correlations byrandomizing the location of the probes, as long as enough configurations are sampled where noise correlations are negative. As a result, superclassical precision scaling is asymptotically restored for initial entangled states, including experimentally accessible one-axis spin-squeezed states.