Optical phase measurement beyond the shot noise limit using optical spin squeezed state

Quantum metrology enables us to estimate optical phase shifts beyond the shot noise limit. Applications include quantum-enhanced biological measurement [1], microscopy [2] and gravitational wave detection[3]. For two-mode N-photon system, the NOON state can achieve the highest possible phase sensitivity where multi-photon coherence between two states significantly contributes to improving the phase sensitivity. Another alternative approach to improve the phase sensitivity by use of squeezed states. Squeezing is usually characterized by reducing the quantum noise of desired observable at the expense of increasing the quantum noise for its non-commute partner. Because shot-noise limits the phase sensitivity of any classical states, the reduced quantum noise can be used for improving the phase sensitivity.

Here we experimentally study the phase sensitivity of an optical spin-squeezed state by using linear optics. We generated the optical spin-squeezed state using one photon subtraction from a down converted photon source. To implement the sub-shot noise measurement, we used multiplexed photon number resolving detectors so that we can reconstruct the photon number statistics of the state. In the talk, we will analyse the generated state in terms of both squeezing and phase sensitivity by using Fisher information.