Adaptive Optical Phase Estimation Using Time-Symmetric Quantum Smoothing

T. A. Wheatley, D. W. Berry, H. Yonezawa, D. Nakane, H. Arao, D. T. Pope, T. C. Ralph, H. M. Wiseman, A. Furusawa, E. H. Huntington

Published 2009-12-07Version 1

Quantum parameter estimation has many applications, from gravitational wave detection to quantum key distribution. We present the first experimental demonstration of the time-symmetric technique of quantum smoothing. We consider both adaptive and non-adaptive quantum smoothing, and show that both are better than their well-known time-asymmetric counterparts (quantum filtering). For the problem of estimating a stochastically varying phase shift on a coherent beam, our theory predicts that adaptive quantum smoothing (the best scheme) gives an estimate with a mean-square error up to $2\sqrt{2}$ times smaller than that from non-adaptive quantum filtering (the standard quantum limit). The experimentally measured improvement is $2.24 \pm 0.14$.