Experimental demonstration of phase measurement precision beating standard quantum limit by projection measurement

Abstract

We propose and demonstrate experimentally a projection scheme to measure the quantum phase with a precision beating the standard quantum limit. The initial input state is a twin Fock state $|N,N>$ proposed by Holland and Burnett [Phys. Rev. Lett. {\bf 71}, 1355 (1993)] but the phase information is extracted by a quantum state projection measurement. The phase precision is about $1.4/N$ for large photon number $N$, which approaches the Heisenberg limit of 1/N. Experimentally, we employ a four-photon state from type-II parametric down-conversion and achieve a phase uncertainty of $0.291\pm 0.001$ beating the standard quantum limit of $1/\sqrt{N}=1/2$ for four photons.

5 figures

References in corpus (8)

• Quantum-enhanced measurements: beating the standard quantum limit
• Quantum Interferometric Optical Lithography: Exploiting Entanglement to Beat The Diffraction Limit
• Super-resolving phase measurements with a multi-photon entangled state
• Beating the Standard Quantum Limit with Four Entangled Photons
• De Broglie Wavelength of a Nonlocal Four-Photon
• Time-reversal and super-resolving phase measurements
• Projection Measurement of the Maximally Entangled N-Photon State for a Demonstration of N-Photon de Broglie Wavelength
• Demonstration of Temporal Distinguishability in a Four-Photon State and a Six-Photon State

Cited by in corpus (27)

• Optical phase estimation in the presence of phase-diffusion
• Quantum metrology with imperfect states and detectors
• All path-symmetric pure states achieve their maximal phase sensitivity in conventional two-path interferometry
• Limits on the heralding efficiencies and spectral purities of spectrally-filtered single photons from photon pair sources
• Environment Assisted Precision Measurement
• Quantum metrology for non-linear phase shifts with entangled coherent states
• Optimal Quantum-Enhanced Interferometry
• Optical interferometry in the presence of large phase diffusion
• Quantum-enhanced interferometry with large heralded photon-number states
• Quantum statistical imaging of particles without restriction of the diffraction limit
• Uncertainty limits for quantum metrology obtained from the statistics of weak measurements
• Quantum optical rotatory dispersion
• Optimal multi-photon phase sensing with a single interference fringe
• Quantum interferometers: principles and applications
• Indistinguishability of independent single photons
• Quantum-enhanced microscopy with binary-outcome photon counting
• Reviving the precision of multiple entangled probes in an open system by simple $\pi$-pulse sequences
• Squeezing as a resource to counteract phase diffusion in optical phase estimation
• Sub-Shot-Noise Quantum Optical Interferometry: A Comparison of Entangled State Performance within a Unified Measurement Scheme
• Nonlinear fiber gyroscope for quantum metrology
• Synthesis of arbitrary, two-mode, high visibility N-photon interference patterns
• Probing mixing of photons and axion-like particles by geometric phase
• Bunching Effect and Quantum Statistics of Partially Indistinguishable Photons
• Indistinguishability-induced classical-to-nonclassical transition of photon statistics
• Majorization of quantum polarization distributions
• The Lindley paradox in optical interferometry
• Quantum effects in the interference of photon number states