Deterministic quantum phase estimation beyond the ideal NOON state limit

Abstract

The measurement of physical parameters is one of the main pillars of science. A classic example is the measurement of the optical phase enabled by optical interferometry where the best sensitivity achievable with N photons scales as 1/N - known as the Heisenberg limit . To achieve phase estimation at the Heisenberg limit, it has been common to consider protocols based on highly complex NOON states of light. However, despite decades of research and several experimental explorations, there has been no demonstration of deterministic phase estimation with NOON states reaching the Heisenberg limit or even surpassing the shot noise limit. Here we use a phase estimation scheme based on a deterministic source of Gaussian squeezed vacuum states and high-efficiency homodyne detection to obtain phase estimates with an extreme sensitivity that significantly surpasses the shot noise limit and even beats the performance of an ideal, and thus unrealistic, NOON state protocol. Using a high-efficiency setup with a total loss of about 11% we achieve a Fisher Information of 15.8(6) rad^2 per photon unparalleled by any other optical phase estimation technology. The work represents a fundamental achievement in quantum metrology, and it opens the door to future quantum sensing technologies for the interrogation of light-sensitive biological systems.

References in corpus (11)

• Quantum Optical Metrology -- The Lowdown on High-N00N States
• Beating the Standard Quantum Limit with Four Entangled Photons
• Entanglement-free Heisenberg-limited phase estimation
• Coherent control of vacuum squeezing in the Gravitational-Wave Detection Band
• Detection loss tolerant supersensitive phase measurement with an SU(1,1) interferometer
• Optimal phase measurements with pure Gaussian states
• Phase detection at the quantum limit with multi-photon Mach-Zehnder interferometry
• Phase estimation for thermal Gaussian states
• Scalable multiphoton quantum metrology with neither pre- nor post-selected measurements
• Photonic angular super-resolution using twisted N00N states
• Breaking the weak Heisenberg limit

Cited by in corpus (13)

• Mesoscopic ultrafast nonlinear optics -- The emergence of multimode quantum non-Gaussian physics
• Continuous-Variable Nonclassicality Detection under Coarse-Grained Measurement
• Quantum learning advantage on a scalable photonic platform
• Multiparameter estimation with two qubit probes in noisy channels
• Adaptive Phase Estimation with Squeezed Vacuum Approaching the Quantum Limit
• Heisenberg-scaling sensitivity in the estimation of two parameters in a Mach-Zehnder interferometer
• Optimal quantum sensing of the nonlinear bosonic interactions using Fock states
• Precision bounds for quantum phase estimation using two-mode squeezed Gaussian states
• Phase-resolved measurement of entangled states via common-path interferometry
• Quantum Metrology under Coarse-Grained Measurement
• Noisy initial-state qubit-channel metrology with additional undesirable noisy evolution
• On-chip squeezed light in the audio frequency band
• Dose-efficient Quantum Phase Estimation in Lossy Optical Interferometry