Beating the Ramsey limit on sensing with deterministic qubit control

Abstract

Quantum sensors promise revolutionary advances in medical imaging, energy production, mass detection, geodesy, foundational physics research, and a host of other fields. In many sensors, the signal takes the form of a changing qubit frequency, which is detected with an interference measurement. Unfortunately, environmental noise decoheres the qubit state, reducing signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). Here we introduce a protocol for enhancing the sensitivity of a measurement of a qubit's frequency in the presence of decoherence. We use a continuous drive to stabilize one component of the qubit's Bloch vector, enhancing the effect of a small static frequency shift. We demonstrate our protocol on a superconducting qubit, enhancing SNR per measurement shot by 1.65$\times$ and SNR per qubit evolution time by 1.09$\times$ compared to standard Ramsey interferometry. We explore the protocol theoretically and numerically, finding maximum enhancements of 1.96$\times$ and 1.18$\times$, respectively. We also show that the protocol is robust to parameter miscalibrations. Our protocol provides an unconditional enhancement in signal-to-noise ratio compared to standard Ramsey interferometry. It requires no feedback and no extra control or measurement resources, and can be immediately applied in a wide variety of quantum computing and quantum sensor technologies to enhance their sensitivities.