Iterative optimization in quantum metrology and entanglement theory using semidefinite programming

The quantum Fisher information (QFI), as a function of quantum states, measures the amount of information that a quantum state carries about an unknown parameter. The (entanglement-assisted) QFI of a quantum channel is defined to be the maximum QFI of the output state assuming an entangled input state over a single probe and an ancilla. In quantum metrology, people are interested in calculating the QFI of N identical copies of a quantum channel when N→∞, which is called the asymptotic QFI. Over the years, researchers found various types of upper bounds of the asymptotic QFI, but they were proven achievable only in several specific situations. It was known that the asymptotic QFI of an arbitrary quantum channel grows either linearly or quadratically with N. Here we show that a simple criterion can determine whether the scaling is linear or quadratic. In both cases, the asymptotic QFI and a quantum error correction protocol to achieve it are computable via a semidefinite program. When the scaling is quadratic, the Heisenberg limit, a feature of noiseless quantum channels, is recovered. When the scaling is linear, we show that the asymptotic QFI is still in general larger than N times the single-channel QFI and, furthermore, that sequential estimation strategies provide no advantage over parallel ones.Received 23 March 2020Revised 20 December 2020Accepted 26 February 2021DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PRXQuantum.2.010343Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article's title, journal citation, and DOI.Published by the American Physical SocietyPhysics Subject Headings (PhySH)Research AreasQuantum error correctionQuantum metrologyQuantum sensingQuantum Information

The quantum Fisher information (QFI) plays a crucial role in quantum information theory and in many practical applications such as quantum metrology. However, computing the QFI is generally a computationally demanding task. In this work we analyze a lower bound on the QFI which we call the sub-quantum Fisher information (sub-QFI). The bound can be efficiently estimated on a quantum computer for an n-qubit state using 2n qubits. The sub-QFI is based on the super-fidelity, an upper bound on Uhlmann’s fidelity. We analyze the sub-QFI in the context of unitary families, where we derive several crucial properties including its geometrical interpretation. In particular, we prove that the QFI and the sub-QFI are maximized for the same optimal state, which implies that the sub-QFI is faithful to the QFI in the sense that both quantities share the same global extrema. Based on this faithfulness, the sub-QFI acts as an efficiently computable surrogate for the QFI for quantum sensing and quantum metrology applications. Finally, we provide additional meaning to the sub-QFI as a measure of coherence, asymmetry, and purity loss.

We have investigated numerically the dynamics of quantum Fisher information (QFI) and quantum entanglement (QE) of a two moving two-level atomic systems interacting with a coherent and thermal field in the presence of intrinsic decoherence (ID) and Kerr (non-linear medium) and Stark effects. The state of the entire system interacting with coherent and thermal fields is evaluated numerically under the influence of ID and Kerr (nonlinear) and Stark effects. QFI and von Neumann entropy (VNE) decrease in the presence of ID when the atomic motion is neglected. QFI and QE show an opposite response during its time evolution in the presence of a thermal environment. QFI is found to be more susceptible to ID as compared to QE in the presence of a thermal environment. The decay of QE is further damped at greater time-scales, which confirms the fact that ID heavily influences the system’s dynamics in a thermal environment. However, a periodic behavior of entanglement is observed due to atomic motion, which becomes modest under environmental effects. It is found that a non-linear Kerr medium has a prominent effect on the VNE but not on the QFI. Furthermore, it has been observed that QFI and QE decay soon under the influence of the Stark effect in the absence of atomic motion. The periodic response of QFI and VNE is observed for both the non-linear Kerr medium and the Stark effect in the presence of atomic motion. It is observed that the Stark, Kerr, ID, and thermal environment have significant effects during the time evolution of the quantum system.

Questioning of quantum information Guolin Wu The Center of Philosophy and Technology, School of Marxism South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, Guangdong, P. R. China. E-Mails: ssglwu@scut.edu.cn * The Center of Philosophy and Technology, School of Marxism. South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, Guangdong, P. R. China,510640; Tel.:0086-13660190516; Fax: 0086-2087114979 Accepted: 19 February 2015

Quantum metrology is a rapidly developing branch of quantum technologies. While various theories have been established on quantum metrology for Markovian processes, i.e., quantum channel estimation, quantum metrology for non-Markovian processes is much less explored. In this Letter, we establish a general framework of non-Markovian quantum metrology. For any parametrized non-Markovian process on a finite-dimensional system, we derive a formula for the maximal amount of quantum Fisher information that can be extracted from it by an optimally controlled probe state. In addition, we design an algorithm that evaluates this quantum Fisher information via semidefinite programming. We apply our framework to noisy frequency estimation, where we find that the optimal performance of quantum metrology is better in the non-Markovian scenario than in the Markovian scenario and explore the possibility of efficient sensing via simple variational circuits.

Decision letter for "Iterative optimization in quantum metrology and entanglement theory using semidefinite programming"

The purpose of quantum teleportation is to achieve perfect transmission of quantum information from one site to another distant site. In the teleportation process, the quantum system is inevitably affected by its surrounding environment, causing the system to lose its coherence, which will result in distortion of the transmitted information. In recent years, weak measurement and measurement reversal have been proposed to suppress the decoherence of quantum entanglement and protect some quantum states. On the other hand, quantum Fisher information (QFI) is an important physical quantity in quantum metrology, which can give the optimal value estimating the accuracy of parameters. As is well known, QFI is highly susceptible to environmental noise and can lead its measurement accuracy to decrease. Therefore, it is of great importance to examine how to protect QFI from being influenced by the external circumstance during the teleportation procedure. In this paper, we study how to improve the QFI of teleporting a single-qubit state via a Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger state in a finite temperature environment with the technique of weak measurement and weak measurement reversal. According to different qubit transmission cases of three quantum teleportation schemes, we consider their respective QFIs in detail. After constructing the quantum logic circuit of each teleportation scheme, we first analyze the variance trend of QFI against the generalized amplitude damping noise parameters. Then by introducing weak measurement and measurement reversal on each noise particle of the three schemes, we optimize the related partial measurement parameters and explore the corresponding improved QFI, namely, the difference between the QFI with optimal partial measurements and that without partial measurements. We find that optimizing partial measurements can efficiently enhance the QFI of the teleported state for the three kinds of teleportation schemes at finite temperature. Moreover, with the value of p fixed, the lower the environment temperature, the larger the value of the improved QFI is. Our results could be useful in further understanding the applications of weak measurement and measurement reversal to the quantum communication process and may shed light on estimating some relevant quantum parameters and implementing quantum information tasks.

Entanglement is at the heart of quantum technologies such as quantum information and quantum metrology. Providing larger quantum Fisher information (QFI), entangled systems can be better resources than separable systems in quantum metrology. However the effects on the entanglement dynamics such as decoherence usually decrease the QFI considerably. On the other hand, Dzyaloshinskii-Moriya (DM) interaction has been shown to excite entanglement. Since an increase in entanglement does not imply an increase in QFI, and also there are cases where QFI decreases as entanglement increases, it is interesting to study the influence of DM interaction on quantum metrology. In this work, we study the QFI of thermal entanglement of two-qubit and three-qubit Heisenberg models with respect to SU(2) rotations. We show that even at high temperatures, DM interaction excites QFI of both ferromagnetic and antiferromagnetic models. We also show that QFI of the ferromagnetic model of two qubits can surpass the shot-noise limit of the separable states, while QFI of the antiferromagnetic model in consideration can only approach to the shot-noise limit. Our results open new insights in quantum metrology with Heisenberg models.

Quantum entanglement lies at the heart of quantum information and quantum metrology. In quantum metrology, with a colossal amount of quantum Fisher information (QFI), entangled systems can be ameliorated to be a better resource scheme. However, noisy channels affect the QFI substantially. This research work seeks to investigate how QFI of N-qubit Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state is affected when subjected to decoherence channels: bit-phase flip (BPF) and generalize amplitude damping (GAD) channels, which can be induced experimentally. We determine the evolution under these channels, deduce the eigenvalues, and then derive the QFI. We found that when there is no interaction with the environment, the Heisenberg limit can be achieved via rotations along the z direction. It has been shown that in BPF channel, the maximal mean QFI of the N-qubit GHZ state ({bar{F}}_{max}) dwindles as decoherence rate (pB) increases due to flow of information from the system to the environment, until pB = 0.5, then revives to form a symmetric around pB = 0.5. Thus, pB > 0.5 leads to a situation where more noise yields more efficiency. We found that in GAD channel, at finite temperature, QFIs decay more rapidly than at zero temperature. Our results also reveal that QFI can be enhanced by adjusting the temperature of the environment.

We study the effect of local decoherence on arbitrary quantum states. Adapting techniques developed in quantum metrology, we show that the action of generic local noise processes --though arbitrarily small-- always yields a state whose Quantum Fisher Information (QFI) with respect to local observables is linear in system size N, independent of the initial state. This implies that all macroscopic quantum states, which are characterized by a QFI that is quadratic in N, are fragile under decoherence, and cannot be maintained if the system is not perfectly isolated. We also provide analytical bounds on the effective system size, and show that the effective system size scales as the inverse of the noise parameter p for small p for all the noise channels considered, making it increasingly difficult to generate macroscopic or even mesoscopic quantum states. In turn, we also show that the preparation of a macroscopic quantum state, with respect to a conserved quantity, requires a device whose QFI is already at least as large as the one of the desired state. Given that the preparation device itself is classical and not a perfectly isolated macroscopic quantum state, the preparation device needs to be quadratically bigger than the macroscopic target state.

A fundamental starting point in quantum information theory is the consideration of the von Neumann entropy and its generalization to relative quantum entropies. A particular feature of quantum relative entropies is their relation via their Hessian to monotonic Riemannian metrics on the dense set of invertible mixed quantum states (Lesniewski and Ruskai 1999). These metrics are also known as quantum Fisher information metrics and provide a direct link to quantum estimation theory (Helstrom 1969). Quantum Fisher information metrics which are extendable to pure states coincide all with the Fubini Study metric of the projective Hilbert space of complex rays. This theses outlines possible advantages of an inverse approach to quantum information theory, by starting with the Fubini Study metric rather then with the von Neumann entropy. This is done in a first step by associating to the Fubini Study metric a covariant and a contra-variant structure on the punctured Hilbert space as being available in the geometric formulation of quantum mechanics. While the contra-variant structure leads to a quantum version of the Cramer-Rao inequality for general 1-dimensional submanifolds of pure states, the covariant structure provides alternative entanglement monotones by identifying an inner product on the pullback tensor fields on local unitary group orbits of quantum states. It is shown in the case of two qubits that these monotones yield a more efficient estimation of entanglement than standard measures from the literature as those associated with the linearization of the von Neumann entropy.

Quantum metrology is a subject of studying quantum measurement and quantum statistical deduction, and the precision of parameter estimation can be enhanced by quantum properties. In general, the process of parameter estimation includes four steps:preparation of probe state, parameterization process, measurement, and data processing. Of these four steps, the preparation of probe state is the most crucial. However, in practical applications, in the process of preparing quantum probe state, the probe system will couple to its environment, which will inevitably cause the quantum properties of the probe system to deteriorate, and thus reducing the precision of quantum parameter estimation. The dynamics of quantum Fisher information (QFI) for W state and Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state have been studied in decoherence channels. Because W state and GHZ state have different entanglement properties, the studies of the dynamics of QFI for the superposition of W state and GHZ state are of practical significance in quantum metrology field. In this paper, the dynamics of QFIs for the superposition of W state and GHZ state in three typical decoherence channels (depolarization channel, amplitude damping channel and phase damping channel) are studied. In the four steps of quantum parameter estimation, our major attention is paid to the first step (i.e., the preparation of probe state). For comparison, the QFIs of different probe states are studied, with the other three steps fixed, i.e., all the probe states will undergo the same parameterization, measurement and estimation process. The parameterization process involved here is a quantum spin operation (specified by the spin rotation direction), which is chosen to maximize the QFI of the probe state. The initial probe states under consideration are the superpositions of W state and GHZ state of three-particle and five-particle systems, and the QFI dynamics of those probe states are studied in the three different typical decoherence channels. By using the operator-sum (Kraus) representation of those three typical decoherence channels, the QFI dynamics of the probe state can be analytically derived in three different decoherence channels. The results show that in the depolarization channel, the maximum QFI of the probe state decreases with the decoherence evolving to zero in the end; in the amplitude damping channel, the QFI of the probe state decreases to the minimum with the decoherence evolution and then increases to the shot noise limit; in the phase damping channel, the QFI of the probe state decreases with the evolution of decoherence, but the final stable value is not zero. Further analyses show that W state component of the superposition plays a role in resisting phase damping and the GHZ state component plays a role in resisting amplitude damping. These results can help us to choose the optimal probe state for maximizing the estimation precision in practice.

Measurements leading to the collapse of states and the non-local quantum correlations are the key to all applications of quantum mechanics as well as in the studies of quantum foundation. The former is crucial for quantum parameter estimation, which is greatly affected by the physical environment and the measurement scheme itself. Its quantification is necessary to find efficient measurement schemes and circumvent the non-desirable environmental effects. This has led to the intense investigation of quantum metrology, extending the Cramér–Rao bound to the quantum domain through quantum Fisher information. Among all quantum states, the separable ones have the least quantumness; being devoid of the fragile non-local correlations, the component states remain unaffected in local operations performed by any of the parties. Therefore, using these states for the remote design of quantum states with high quantum Fisher information can have diverse applications in quantum information processing; accurate parameter estimation being a prominent example, as the quantum information extraction solely depends on it. Here, we demonstrate that these separable states with the least quantumness can be made extremely useful in parameter estimation tasks, and further show even in the case of the shared channel inflicted with the amplitude damping noise and phase flip noise, there is a gain in Quantum Fisher information (QFI). We subsequently pointed out that the symmetric W states, incapable of perfectly teleporting an unknown quantum state, are highly effective for remotely designing quantum states with high quantum Fisher information.

Quantum metrology is superior to classical metrology in parameter estimation. This is because quantum states have coherence that, however, does not exist in classical states. Previous works were limited to the study of the relationship between quantum Fisher information (QFI) and coherence of the initial probe state only for a specific single-qubit parameter estimation process (e.g., a process described by a single-qubit spin angular momentum operator ${J}_{z}$). Here, we consider a more general case and study the relationship between QFI and coherence of the initial probe state for a single-qubit general parameter estimation process, which is described by a single-qubit spin angular momentum operator ${J}_{\stackrel{P\vec}{n}}$ with a general unit vector $\stackrel{P\vec}{n}$. We find that the QFI is proportional to the square of coherence of the initial probe state, when the single-qubit bases are eigenstates of the spin angular momentum operator ${J}_{\stackrel{P\vec}{n}}$ describing the parametrization process. We also design and conduct a linear optical experiment to support our theory. The experimental results are in good agreement with the theoretical ones. This work provides an important guideline for enhancing the precision of parameter estimation.

In this paper, we have proposed the numerical calculations to study the quantum entanglement (QE) of moving two-level atom interacting with a coherent and the thermal field influenced by intrinsic decoherence (ID), Kerr medium (non-linear) and the Stark effect. The wave function of the complete system interacting with a coherent and the thermal field is calculated numerically affected by ID, Kerr (non-linear) and Stark effects. It has been seen that the Stark, Kerr, ID and the thermal environment have a significant effect during the time evolution of the quantum system. Quantum Fisher information (QFI) and QE decrease as the value of the ID parameter is increased in the thermal field without the atomic movement. It is seen that QFI and von Neumann entropy (VNE) show an opposite and periodic response in the presence of atomic motion. The non-linear Kerr medium has a more prominent and significant effect on the QE as the value of the Kerr parameter is decreased. At smaller values of the non-linear Kerr parameter, the VNE increases, however, QFI decreases, so QFI and VNE have a monotonic connection with one another. As the value of the Kerr parameter is increased, the effect of non-linear Kerr doesn’t stay critical on both QFI and QE. However, a periodic response of QE is seen because of the atomic movement which becomes modest under natural impacts. Moreover, it has been seen that QFI and QE rot soon at the smaller values of the Stark parameter. However, as the value of the Stark parameter is increased, the QFI and QE show periodic response even when the atomic movement is absent.