arXiv subjects

Francesco Albarelli

Publications and source records attributed to Francesco Albarelli.

At least 37 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2024

Pseudomode treatment of strong-coupling quantum thermodynamics

The treatment of quantum thermodynamic systems beyond weak coupling is of increasing relevance, yet extremely challenging. The evaluation of thermodynamic quantities in strong-coupling regimes requires a nonperturbative knowledge of the bath dynamics, which in turn relies on heavy numerical simulations. To tame these difficulties, considering thermal bosonic baths linearly coupled to the open system, we derive expressions for heat, work, and average system-bath interaction energy that only involve the autocorrelation function of the bath and two-time expectation values of system operators. We then exploit the pseudomode approach, which replaces the physical continuous bosonic bath with a small finite number of damped, possibly interacting, modes, to numerically evaluate these relevant thermodynamic quantities. We show in particular that this method allows for an efficient numerical evaluation of thermodynamic quantities in terms of one-time expectation values of the open system and the pseudomodes. We apply this framework to the investigation of two paradigmatic situations. In the first instance, we study the entropy production for a two-level system coupled to an ohmic bath, simulated via interacting pseudomodes, allowing for the presence of time-dependent driving. Secondly, we consider a quantum thermal machine composed of a two-level system interacting with two thermal baths at different temperatures, showing that an appropriate sinusoidal modulation of the coupling with the cold bath only is enough to obtain work extraction.

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arXiv2024

Fisher information susceptibility for multiparameter quantum estimation

Noise affects the performance of quantum technologies, hence the importance of elaborating operative figures of merit that can capture its impact in exact terms. In quantum metrology, the introduction of the Fisher information measurement noise susceptibility now allows to quantify the robustness of measurement for single-parameter estimation. Here we extend this notion to the multiparameter quantum estimation scenario. We provide its mathematical definition in the form of a semidefinite program. Although a closed formula could not be found, we further derive an upper and a lower bound to the susceptibility. We then apply these techniques to two paradigmatic examples of multiparameter estimation: the joint estimation of phase and phase-diffusion and the estimation of the different parameters describing the incoherent mixture of optical point sources. Our figure of merit provides clear indications on conditions allowing or hampering robustness of multiparameter measurements.

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arXiv2024

On the role of chirping in pulsed single photon spectroscopy

We investigate the precision of estimating the interaction strength between a two-level system (TLS) and a single-photon pulse when the latter is subject to chirping. We consider linear, quadratic, and sinusoidal temporal phases applied to Gaussian and exponential temporal profiles. At the asymptotic time, when the TLS has fully decayed to its ground state, the fundamental precision depends solely on the magnitude of its spectral amplitude. For quadratically phase-modulated Gaussian pulses, this is entirely determined by the spectral bandwidth. We provide expressions for evaluating the fundamental precision for general temporal profiles and phase modulations. Finally, we show that experimentally feasible mode-resolved measurements are optimal, or close to it, for chirped, pulsed single photon spectroscopy.

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arXiv2023

A pedagogical introduction to continuously monitored quantum systems and measurement-based feedback

In this manuscript we present a pedagogical introduction to continuously monitored quantum systems. We start by giving a simplified derivation of the Markovian master equation in Lindblad form, in the spirit of collision models and input-output theory, which describes the unconditional dynamics of a continuously monitored system. The same formalism is then exploited to derive stochastic master equations that describe the conditional dynamics. We focus on the two most paradigmatic examples of continuous monitoring: continuous photodetection, leading to a discontinuous dynamics with "quantum jumps", and continuous homodyne measurements, leading to a diffusive dynamics. We then present a derivation of feedback master equations that describe the dynamics (either conditional or unconditional) when the continuous measurement photocurrents are fed back to the system as a linear driving Hamiltonian, a paradigm known as linear Markovian feedback. In the second part of the manuscript we focus on continuous-variable Gaussian systems: we first present the equations for first and second moments describing the dynamics under continuous general-dyne measurements, and we then discuss in more detail the conditional and unconditional dynamics under Markovian and state-based feedback.

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arXiv2023

Shadow tomography on general measurement frames

We provide a new perspective on shadow tomography by demonstrating its deep connections with the general theory of measurement frames. By showing that the formalism of measurement frames offers a natural framework for shadow tomography -- in which ``classical shadows'' correspond to unbiased estimators derived from a suitable dual frame associated with the given measurement -- we highlight the intrinsic connection between standard state tomography and shadow tomography. Such perspective allows us to examine the interplay between measurements, reconstructed observables, and the estimators used to process measurement outcomes, while paving the way to assess the influence of the input state and the dimension of the underlying space on estimation errors. Our approach generalizes the method described in [H.-Y. Huang {\it et al.}, Nat. Phys. 16, 1050 (2020)], whose results are recovered in the special case of covariant measurement frames. As an application, we demonstrate that a sought-after target of shadow tomography can be achieved for the entire class of tight rank-1 measurement frames -- namely, that it is possible to accurately estimate a finite set of generic rank-1 bounded observables while avoiding the growth of the number of the required samples with the state dimension.

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arXiv2023

Does entanglement enhance single-molecule pulsed biphoton spectroscopy?

It depends. For a single molecule interacting with one mode of a biphoton probe, we show that the spectroscopic information has three contributions, only one of which is a genuine two-photon contribution. When all the scattered light can be measured, solely this contribution exists and can be fully extracted using unentangled measurements. Furthermore, this two-photon contribution can, in principle, be matched by an optimised but unentangled single-photon probe. When the matter system spontaneously emits into inaccessible modes, an advantage due to entanglement can not be ruled out. In practice, time-frequency entanglement does enhance spectroscopic performance of the oft-studied weakly-pumped spontaneous parametric down conversion (PDC) probes. For two-level systems and coupled dimers, more entangled PDC probes yield more spectroscopic information, even in the presence of emission into inaccessible modes. Moreover, simple, unentangled measurements can capture between 60% - 90% of the spectroscopic information. We thus establish that biphoton spectroscopy using source-engineered PDC probes and unentangled measurements can provide tangible quantum enhancement. Our work underscores the intricate role of entanglement in single-molecule spectroscopy using quantum light.

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arXiv2023

Invasiveness of non-equilibrium quantum thermometry

One of the main advantages expected from using quantum probes as thermometers is non invasiveness, i.e., a negligible perturbation to the thermal sample. However, invasiveness is rarely investigated explicitly. Here, focusing on a pure-dephasing spin probe in a bosonic sample, we show that there is a non-trivial relation between the information on the temperature gained by a quantum probe and the heat absorbed by the sample due to the interaction. We show that optimizing over the probing time, i.e. considering a time-optimal probing scheme, also has the benefit of limiting the heat absorbed by the sample in each shot of the experiment. For such time-optimal protocols, we show that it is advantageous to have very strong probe-sample coupling, since in this regime the accuracy increases linearly with the coupling strength, while the amount of heat per shot saturates to a finite value. Since in pure-dephasing models the absorbed heat corresponds to the external work needed to couple and decouple the probe and the sample, our results also represent a first step towards the analysis of the thermodynamic and energetic cost of quantum thermometry.

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arXiv2023

Quantum asymmetry and noisy multi-mode interferometry

Quantum asymmetry is a physical resource which coincides with the amount of coherence between the eigenspaces of a generator responsible for phase encoding in interferometric experiments. We highlight an apparently counter-intuitive behavior that the asymmetry may \emph{increase} as a result of a \emph{decrease} of coherence inside a degenerate subspace. We intuitively explain and illustrate the phenomena by performing a three-mode single-photon interferometric experiment, where one arm carries the signal and two noisy reference arms have fluctuating phases. We show that the source of the observed sensitivity improvement is the reduction of correlations between these fluctuations and comment on the impact of the effect when moving from the single-photon quantum level to the classical regime. Finally, we also establish the analogy of the effect in the case of entanglement resource theory.

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arXiv2023

Fundamental limits of pulsed quantum light spectroscopy: Dipole moment estimation

We study the fundamental limits of the precision of estimating parameters of a quantum matter system when it is probed by a travelling pulse of quantum light. In particular, we focus on the estimation of the interaction strength between the pulse and a two-level atom, equivalent to the estimation of the dipole moment. Our analysis of single-photon pulses highlights the interplay between the information gained from the absorption of the photon by the atom as measured in absorption spectroscopy, and the perturbation to the temporal mode of the photon due to spontaneous emission. Beyond the single-photon regime, we introduce an approximate model to study more general states of light in the limit of short pulses, where spontaneous emission can be neglected. We also show that for a vast class of entangled biphoton states, quantum entanglement between the signal mode interacting with the atom and the idler mode provides no fundamental advantage and the same precision can be obtained with a separable state. We conclude by studying the estimation of the electric dipole moment of a sodium atom using quantum light. Our work initiates a quantum information theoretic methodology for developing the theory and practice of quantum light spectroscopy.

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arXiv2023

Using adaptiveness and causal superpositions against noise in quantum metrology

We derive new bounds on achievable precision in the most general adaptive quantum metrological scenarios. The bounds are proven to be asymptotically saturable and equivalent to the known parallel scheme bounds in the limit of large number of channel uses. This completely solves a long standing conjecture in the field of quantum metrology on asymptotic equivalence between parallel and adaptive strategies. The new bounds also allow to easily assess the potential benefits of invoking the non-standard causal superposition strategies, for which we prove, similarly to the adaptive case, the lack of asymptotic advantage over the parallel ones.

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arXiv2021

Probe incompatibility in multiparameter noisy quantum metrology

We derive fundamental bounds on the maximal achievable precision in multiparameter noisy quantum metrology, valid under the most general entanglement-assisted adaptive strategy, which are tighter than the bounds obtained by a direct use of single-parameter results. This allows us to study the issue of the optimal probe incompatibility in the simultaneous estimation of multiple parameters in generic noisy channels, while so far the issue has been studied mostly in effectively noiseless scenarios (where the Heisenberg scaling is possible). We apply our results to the estimation of both unitary and noise parameters, and indicate models where the fundamental probe incompatibility is present. In particular, we show that in lossy multiple arm interferometry the probe incompatibility is as strong as in the noiseless scenario. Finally, going beyond the multiple-parameter estimation paradigm, we introduce the concept of \emph{random quantum sensing} and show how the tools developed may be applied to multiple channel discrimination problems. As an illustration, we provide a simple proof of the loss of the quadratic advantage of time-continuous Grover algorithm in presence of dephasing or erasure noise.

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arXiv2021

Semiparametric estimation in Hong-Ou-Mandel interferometry

We apply the theory of semiparametric estimation to a Hong-Ou-Mandel interference experiment with a spectrally entangled two-photon state generated by spontaneous parametric downconversion. Thanks to the semiparametric approach we can evaluate the Cramér-Rao bound and find an optimal estimator for a particular parameter of interest without assuming perfect knowledge of the two-photon wave function, formally treated as an infinity of nuisance parameters. In particular, we focus on the estimation of the Hermite-Gauss components of the marginal symmetrised wavefunction, whose Fourier transform governs the shape of the temporal coincidence profile. We show that negativity of these components is an entanglement witness of the two-photon state.

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arXiv2021

Kramers-Kronig relations and precision limits in quantum phase estimation

The ultimate precision in any measurement is dictated by the physical process implementing the observation. The methods of quantum metrology have now succeeded in establishing bounds on the achievable precision for phase measurements over noisy channels. In particular, they demonstrate how the Heisenberg scaling of the precision can not be attained in these conditions. Here we discuss how the ultimate bound in presence of loss has a physical motivation in the Kramers-Kronig relations and we show how they link the precision on the phase estimation to that on the loss parameter.

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arXiv2020

Noisy quantum metrology enhanced by continuous nondemolition measurement

We show that continuous quantum nondemolition (QND) measurement of an atomic ensemble is able to improve the precision of frequency estimation even in the presence of independent dephasing acting on each atom. We numerically simulate the dynamics of an ensemble with up to N = 150 atoms initially prepared in a (classical) spin coherent state, and we show that, thanks to the spin squeezing dynamically generated by the measurement, the information obtainable from the continuous photocurrent scales superclassically with respect to the number of atoms N. We provide evidence that such superclassical scaling holds for different values of dephasing and monitoring efficiency. We moreover calculate the extra information obtainable via a final strong measurement on the conditional states generated during the dynamics and show that the corresponding ultimate limit is nearly achieved via a projective measurement of the spin-squeezed collective spin operator. We also briefly discuss the difference between our protocol and standard estimation schemes, where the state preparation time is neglected.

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arXiv2020

Upper bounds on the Holevo Cramér-Rao bound for multiparameter quantum parametric and semiparametric estimation

We formulate multiparameter quantum estimation in the parametric and semiparametric setting. While the Holevo Cramér-Rao bound (CRB) requires no substantial modifications in moving from the former to the latter, we generalize the Helstrom CRB appropriately. We show that the Holevo CRB cannot be greater than twice the generalized Helstrom CRB. We also present a tighter, intermediate, bound. Finally, we show that for parameters encoded in the first moments of a Gaussian state there always exists a Gaussian measurement that gives a classical Fisher information matrix that is one-half of the quantum Fisher information matrix.

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arXiv2020

Attainability of the Holevo-Cramér-Rao bound for two-qubit 3D magnetometry

We study quantum-limited 3D magnetometry using two qubits. Two qubits form the smallest multi-qubit system for 3D magnetometry, the simultaneous estimation of three phases, as it is impossible with a single qubit. We provide an analytical expression for the Holevo-Cramér-Rao bound (HCRB),the fundamental attainable quantum bound of multiparameter estimation, for 3D magnetometry using two-qubit pure states and show its attainability by rank-1 projective measurements. We also examine the attainability of the HCRB in the presence of dephasing noise using numerical methods. While attaining the HCRB may require collective measurements over infinitely many copies, we find that for high noise the HCRB is practically saturated by two copies only. In the low noise regime, up to three copies are unable to attain the HCRB. More generally, we introduce new multiparameter channel bounds to compare quantum-classical and classical-quantum strategies where multiple independent copies of the state are entangled before or after recording the parameters respectively. We find that their relative performance depends on the noise strength, with theclassical-quantum strategy performing better for high noise. We end with shallow quantum circuits that approach the fundamental quantum limit set by the HCRB for two-qubit 3D magnetometry using up to three copies.

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arXiv2020

Experimental quantum-enhanced response function estimation

Characterizing a system often demands learning its response function to an applied field. Such knowledge is rooted on the experimental evaluation of punctual fiducial response and interpolation to access prediction at arbitrary values. Quantum metrological resources are known to provide enhancement in assessing these fiducial points, but the implications for improved function estimation have only recently been explored, and have not been yet demonstrated. Here we show an experimental realization of function estimation based on a photonic achitecture. The phase response of a liquid-crystal to a voltage has been reconstructed by means of quantum and classical phase estimation, providing evidence of the superiority of the former and highlighting the interplay between punctual statistical error and interpolation error. Our results show how quantum resources should successfully be employed to access the rich information contained in continuous signals.

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arXiv2020

Quantum Semiparametric Estimation

In the study of quantum limits to parameter estimation, the high dimensionality of the density operator and that of the unknown parameters have long been two of the most difficult challenges. Here we propose a theory of quantum semiparametric estimation that can circumvent both challenges and produce simple analytic bounds for a class of problems in which the dimensions are arbitrarily high, few prior assumptions about the density operator are made, but only a finite number of the unknown parameters are of interest. We also relate our bounds to Holevo's version of the quantum Cramér-Rao bound, so that they can inherit the asymptotic attainability of the latter in many cases of interest. The theory is especially relevant to the estimation of a parameter that can be expressed as a function of the density operator, such as the expectation value of an observable, the fidelity to a pure state, the purity, or the von Neumann entropy. Potential applications include quantum state characterization for many-body systems, optical imaging, and interferometry, where full tomography of the quantum state is often infeasible and only a few select properties of the system are of interest.

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