Trade-off relation between integrated metrological gain and local dissipation in magnetic-field sensing by quantum spin ensemble

TL;DR

This paper establishes a fundamental bound on magnetic-field sensing performance using quantum spin ensembles, revealing how dissipation impacts the achievable metrological gain and the role of entanglement over time.

Contribution

It derives an exact trade-off relation between integrated metrological gain and dissipation, incorporating dissipative dynamics into quantum sensing limits.

Findings

Metrological gain scales inversely with dissipation strength.

Entanglement enhances short-term precision but accelerates degradation.

Long-term performance can be achieved without entanglement.

Abstract

Quantum metrology plays a central role in precision sensing, where quantum enhancement of detection performance is crucial for both fundamental studies and practical applications. In this work, we derive a tight performance bound for magnetic-field sensing with a spin ensemble in the presence of dissipation. The metrological performance is quantified by the integrated metrological gain (IMG), which explicitly incorporates the time evolution of the measurement apparatus. By combining the Lindblad master equation with the quantum Fisher information, we obtain analytically exact trade-off relations between the IMG and the dissipation rate for local dephasing and local emission processes, showing that the gain scales inversely with the dissipation strength. This trade-off complements the Heisenberg limit, which addresses only the scaling with the number of spins and neglects dissipative dynamics. We analyze various initial state preparations and elucidate the role of quantum entanglement in the presence of dissipation. Notably, while entanglement is essential for achieving Heisenberg scaling at short times, it also accelerates dissipative degradation during time evolution. Consequently, for sufficiently long observation times, comparable metrological performance can be achieved even without entanglement.