Protection of noise squeezing in a quantum interferometer with optimal resource allocation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a quantum interferometer with a variable beam splitter to protect quantum resources against environmental losses, achieving near-optimal phase sensitivity and reducing resource requirements in noisy conditions.

Contribution

The study proposes and experimentally demonstrates a novel interferometer design that optimally allocates resources to maintain quantum advantage under high loss conditions.

Findings

Achieves near the quantum Cramér-Rao bound with optimized splitting ratios.

Maintains ~1.6 dB sensitivity enhancement with 2.0 dB squeezed vacuum under 90% loss.

Reduces quantum resource needs from 24 dB to 6 dB in high-loss scenarios.

Abstract

Interferometers are crucial for precision measurements, including gravitational waves, laser ranging, radar, and imaging. The phase sensitivity, the core parameter, can be quantum-enhanced to break the standard quantum limit (SQL) using quantum states. However, quantum states are highly fragile and quickly degrade with losses. We design and demonstrate a quantum interferometer utilizing a beam splitter with a variable splitting ratio to protect the quantum resource against environmental impacts. The optimal phase sensitivity can reach the quantum Cram\'{e}r-Rao bound of the system. This quantum interferometer can greatly reduce the quantum source requirements in quantum measurements. In theory, with a 66.6% loss rate, the sensitivity can break the SQL using only a 6.0 dB squeezed quantum resource with the current interferometer rather than a 24 dB squeezed quantum resource with a conventional squeezing-vacuum-injected Mach-Zehnder interferometer. In experiments, when using a 2.0 dB squeezed vacuum state, the sensitivity enhancement remains at ~1.6 dB via optimizing the first splitting ratio when the loss rate changes from 0% to 90%, indicating that the quantum resource is excellently protected with the existence of losses in practical applications. This strategy could open a way to retain quantum advantages for quantum information processing and quantum precision measurement in lossy environments.