Asymptotic role of entanglement in quantum metrology

TL;DR

This paper investigates how quantum entanglement influences measurement precision in quantum metrology, revealing that near-optimal resolution can be achieved even with vanishing entanglement as system size grows.

Contribution

It establishes the asymptotic behavior of entanglement and quantum Fisher information, showing near-Heisenberg scaling is possible with minimal entanglement in large systems.

Findings

Heisenberg Limit $1/N^{2}$ requires persistent entanglement.

Near-Heisenberg scaling $1/N^{2- ext{small}}$ is achievable with vanishing entanglement.

Quantum Fisher information relates to the geometry of quantum states and entanglement.

Abstract

Quantum systems allow one to sense physical parameters beyond the reach of classical statistics---with resolutions greater than $1/N$, where $N$ is the number of constituent particles independently probing a parameter. In the canonical phase sensing scenario the \emph{Heisenberg Limit} $1/N^{2}$ may be reached, which requires, as we show, both the relative size of the largest entangled block and the geometric measure of entanglement to be nonvanishing as $N\to\infty$. Yet, we also demonstrate that in the asymptotic $N$ limit any precision scaling arbitrarily close to the Heisenberg Limit ($1/N^{2-\varepsilon}$ with any $\varepsilon>0$) may be attained, even though the system gradually becomes noisier and separable, so that both the above entanglement quantifiers asymptotically vanish. Our work shows that sufficiently large quantum systems achieve nearly optimal resolutions despite their relative amount of entanglement being arbitrarily small. In deriving our results, we establish the continuity relation of the quantum Fisher information evaluated for a phaselike parameter, which lets us link it directly to the geometry of quantum states, and hence naturally to the geometric measure of entanglement.