Adaptive phase estimation with squeezed thermal light

Abstract

Summary form only given. The use of quantum states of light in optical interferometry improves the precision in the estimation of a phase shift, paving the way for applications in quantum metrology, computation and cryptography. Sub-shot noise phase sensing can for example be achieved by injecting a squeezed vacuum into an interferometer . However, this approach leads to enhanced sensitivity only for small phase shifts. In this work we aim for ab initio sub-shot noise estimation of an unknown phase shift using a pre-determined squeezed probe and an adaptive measurement approach. We experimentally investigate the performances of such protocol under the realistic assumption of thermalization of the probe state. Indeed, adaptive phase estimation schemes with squeezed states and Bayesian processing of homodyne data have been shown to be asymptotically optimal in the pure case, thus approaching the quantum Cramer-Rao bound. In our protocol we take advantage of the enhanced sensitivity of homodyne detection in proximity of the optimal phase which maximizes the homodyne Fisher information. A squeezed thermal probe state (signal) undergoes an unknown phase shift. The first estimation step involves interference on a beam splitter of the signal and a local oscillator followed by homodyne detection. Homodyne data is then processed to compute a rough estimation of the phase through Bayesian inference. The rough estimation is fed back to the local oscillator in order to match the optimal relative phase with the signal. A second estimation step leads to the final estimation of the phase shift. Thermalization of the probe state prevents the attainability of the quantum Cramer-Rao bound. Nevertheless, we show that the studied adaptive scheme still saturates the classical Cramer-Rao bound, showing sub-shot noise behaviour and therefore extracting the maximum available information from homodyne data. In contrast to previous approaches, our scheme is optimized for Gaussian states.