Original citation:Gagatsos, Christos N., Branford, Dominic and Datta, Animesh. (2016) Gaussian systems for quantum-enhanced multiple phase estimation. Physical Review A, 94 (4). 042342. Permanent WRAP URL: http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/83269 Copyright and reuse:The Warwick Research Archive Portal (WRAP) makes this work by researchers of the University of Warwick available open access under the following conditions. Copyright © and all moral rights to the version of the paper presented here belong to the individual author(s) and/or other copyright owners. To the extent reasonable and practicable the material made available in WRAP has been checked for eligibility before being made available.Copies of full items can be used for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge. Provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. Publisher statement: © 2016 American Physical Society A note on versions:The version presented here may differ from the published version or, version of record, if you wish to cite this item you are advised to consult the publisher's version. Please see the 'permanent WRAP URL' above for details on accessing the published version and note that access may require a subscription. For a fixed average energy, the simultaneous estimation of multiple phases can provide a better total precision than estimating them individually. We show this for a multimode interferometer with a phase in each mode, using Gaussian inputs and passive elements, by calculating the covariance matrix. The quantum Cramér-Rao bound provides a lower bound to the covariance matrix via the quantum Fisher information matrix, whose elements we derive to be the covariances of the photon numbers across the modes. We prove that this bound can be saturated. In spite of the Gaussian nature of the problem, the calculation of non-Gaussian integrals is required, which we accomplish analytically. We find our simultaneous strategy to yield no more than a factor-of-2 improvement in total precision, possibly because of a fundamental performance limitation of Gaussian states. Our work shows that no modal entanglement is necessary for simultaneous quantum-enhanced estimation of multiple phases.

We examine the behavior of non-Gaussian states of light under the action of probabilistic noiseless amplification and attenuation. Surprisingly, we find that the mean field amplitude may decrease in the process of noiseless amplification -or increase in the process of noiseless attenuation, a counterintuitive effect that Gaussian states cannot exhibit. This striking phenomenon could be tested with experimentally accessible non-Gaussian states, such as single-photon added coherent states. We propose an experimental scheme, which is robust with respect to the major experimental imperfections such as inefficient single-photon detection and imperfect photon addition. In particular, we argue that the observation of mean field amplification by noiseless attenuation should be feasible with current technology.

We introduce a complete description of a multi-mode bosonic quantum state in the coherent-state basis (which in this work is denoted as "K" function ), which-up to a phase-is the square root of the well-known Husimi "Q" representation. We express the K function of any N -mode Gaussian state as a function of its covariance matrix and displacement vector, and also that of a general continuous-variable cluster state in terms of the modal squeezing and graph topology of the cluster. This formalism lets us characterize the non Gaussian state left over when one measures a subset of modes of a Gaussian state using photon number resolving detection, the fidelity of the obtained non-Gaussian state with any target state, and the associated heralding probability, all analytically. We show that this probability can be expressed as a Hafnian, re-interpreting the output state of a circuit claimed to demonstrate quantum supremacy termed Gaussian boson sampling. As an example-application of our formalism, we propose a method to prepare a two-mode coherent-cat-basis Bell state with fidelity close to unity and success probability that is fundamentally higher than that of a well-known scheme that splits an approximate single-mode cat state-obtained by photon number subtraction on a squeezed vacuum mode-on a balanced beam splitter. This formalism could enable exploration of efficient generation of cat-basis entangled states, which are known to be useful for quantum error correction against photon loss.