Fidelity of Quantum Interferometers

Abstract

For a generic interferometer, the conditional probability density distribution, $p(\phi|m)$, for the phase $\phi$ given measurement outcome $m$, will generally have multiple peaks. Therefore, the phase sensitivity of an interferometer cannot be adequately characterized by the standard deviation, such as $\Delta\phi\sim 1/\sqrt{N}$ (the standard limit), or $\Delta\phi\sim 1/N$ (the Heisenberg limit). We propose an alternative measure of phase sensitivity--the fidelity of an interferometer--defined as the Shannon mutual information between the phase shift $\phi$\ and the measurement outcomes $m$. As an example application of interferometer fidelity, we consider a generic optical Mach-Zehnder interferometer, used as a sensor of a classical field. We find the surprising result that an entangled {\it N00N} state input leads to a lower fidelity than a Fock state input, for the same photon number.