Photonic quantum metrology with variational quantum optical non-linearities

A. Muñoz de las Heras, C. Tabares, J. T. Schneider, L. Tagliacozzo, D. Porras, A. González-Tudela

Published 2023-09-18Version 1

Photonic quantum metrology harnesses complex quantum states of light, such as Fock or NOON states, to measure unknown parameters beyond classical precision limits. Currently, its main bottleneck is the efficient generation of metrologically-relevant states with large photon numbers because state-of-the-art methods are either probabilistic with a decreasing success probability with the photon number or deterministic ones with poor fidelities due to the large number of operations required. Here, we show how to deterministically generate metrologically-relevant states with large photon numbers exploiting tunable quantum optical non-linearities in a variational way. We benchmark our method with two different classes of non-linearities: the one coming from the coupling of light to a two-level emitter and a Kerr-type one. We show empirically that our method can reach metrologically-relevant states with a low number of operations independently of the photon-number, and study its resilience against noise.