Quantum metrology with full and fast quantum control

We establish general limits on how precise a parameter, e.g. frequency or the strength of a magnetic field, can be estimated with the aid of full and fast quantum control. We consider uncorrelated noisy evolutions of N qubits and show that fast control allows to fully restore the Heisenberg scaling...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Pavel Sekatski, Michalis Skotiniotis, Janek Kołodyński, Wolfgang Dür
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Verein zur Förderung des Open Access Publizierens in den Quantenwissenschaften 2017-09-01
Series:Quantum
Online Access:https://quantum-journal.org/q-2017-09-06-27/pdf/
Description
Summary:We establish general limits on how precise a parameter, e.g. frequency or the strength of a magnetic field, can be estimated with the aid of full and fast quantum control. We consider uncorrelated noisy evolutions of N qubits and show that fast control allows to fully restore the Heisenberg scaling (~1/N^2) for all rank-one Pauli noise except dephasing. For all other types of noise the asymptotic quantum enhancement is unavoidably limited to a constant-factor improvement over the standard quantum limit (~1/N) even when allowing for the full power of fast control. The latter holds both in the single-shot and infinitely-many repetitions scenarios. However, even in this case allowing for fast quantum control helps to increase the improvement factor. Furthermore, for frequency estimation with finite resource we show how a parallel scheme utilizing any fixed number of entangled qubits but no fast quantum control can be outperformed by a simple, easily implementable, sequential scheme which only requires entanglement between one sensing and one auxiliary qubit.
ISSN:2521-327X