Quantum non-demolition measurement based on an SU(1,1)-SU(2)-concatenated atom-light hybrid interferometer

Abstract

Quantum non-demolition (QND) measurement is an important tool in the field of quantum information processing and quantum optics. The atom-light hybrid interferometer is of great interest due to its combination of atomic spin wave and optical wave, which can be utilized for photon number QND measurement via the AC-Stark effect. In this paper, we present an actively correlated atom-light hybrid interferometer where the output is detected with the method of active correlation output readout via a nonlinear Raman process (NRP). Then this interferometer is used for QND measurement of photon number and the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) is studied. Compared to the traditional SU(2) interferometer, the SNR in a balanced case is improved by a gain factor of g of NRP. Furthermore, the performance of QND measurement is analyzed. In the presence of losses, the measurement quality is reduced. We can adjust the gain parameter of the NRP in readout stage to reduce the impact due to losses. Moreover, this scheme is a multiarm interferometer, which has the potential of multiparameter estimation with many important applications in the detection of vector fields, quantum imaging and so on.