Multiparameter Heisenberg limit

Abstract

Using a quantum version of the Bell-Ziv-Zakai bound, I derive a Heisenberg limit to multiparameter estimation for any Gaussian prior probability density. The mean-square error lower bound is shown to have a universal quadratic scaling with respect to a quantum resource, such as the average photon number in the case of optical phase estimation, suitably weighted by the prior covariance matrix.