Entanglement-enhanced sensing in a lossy and noisy environment

Nonclassical states are essential for optics-based quantum information processing, but their fragility limits their utility for practical scenarios in which loss and noise inevitably degrade, if not destroy, nonclassicality. Exploiting nonclassical states in quantum metrology yields sensitivity adva...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Physical review letters 2015-03, Vol.114 (11), p.110506-110506
Main Authors: Zhang, Zheshen, Mouradian, Sara, Wong, Franco N C, Shapiro, Jeffrey H
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Data processing
Detection
Fragility
Metrology
Noise
Noise levels
Optimization
Utilities
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Nonclassical states are essential for optics-based quantum information processing, but their fragility limits their utility for practical scenarios in which loss and noise inevitably degrade, if not destroy, nonclassicality. Exploiting nonclassical states in quantum metrology yields sensitivity advantages over all classical schemes delivering the same energy per measurement interval to the sample being probed. These enhancements, almost without exception, are severely diminished by quantum decoherence. Here, we experimentally demonstrate an entanglement-enhanced sensing system that is resilient to quantum decoherence. We employ entanglement to realize a 20% signal-to-noise ratio improvement over the optimum classical scheme in an entanglement-breaking environment plagued by 14 dB of loss and a noise background 75 dB stronger than the returned probe light. Our result suggests that advantageous quantum-sensing technology could be developed for practical situations.
ISSN:0031-9007
1079-7114
DOI:10.1103/PhysRevLett.114.110506