Fundamental limits of parameter estimation with heralded optical non-Gaussian states generated from Gaussian resources

Abstract

Non-Gaussian states can exhibit large quantum Fisher information (QFI) in quantum sensing. In optical systems, however, its generation is often probabilistic via the boson-sampling type conditional operation and thus its generation rate is limited. This probabilistic generation of non-Gaussian resource should be taken into account for evaluation of the sensing performance. Then a natural question arising is whether the use of heralded probabilistic non-Gaussian states is better than that of the original deterministic Gaussian states for quantum sensing. In this paper, we answer to this question for single-parameter phase-estimation. By using photon-number conservation in passive linear optical systems, we show that heralded state preparation before parameter encoding can be mapped to a postselection problem after parameter encoding for phase estimation. This mapping allows the success probability of heralding to be included naturally in the metrological performance. We introduce an effective quantum Fisher information (EQFI), defined as the success-probability-weighted QFI of the heralded outputs, and prove that it cannot exceed the QFI of the original Gaussian inputs. The result highlights the importance of resource counting in quantum sensing toward better understanding of the resource efficient advantage of optical quantum sensing.