Adaptive protocols for SU(1,1) interferometers to achieve ab initio phase estimation at the Heisenberg limit

Abstract

The precision of phase estimation with interferometers can be greatly enhanced using non-classical quantum states, and the SU(1,1) interferometer is an elegant scheme, which generates two-mode squeezed state internally and also amplifies the signal. It has been shown in Anderson et al (2017 Phys. Rev. A 95 063843) that the photon-number measurement can achieve the Heisenberg limit, but only for estimating a small phase shift. We relax the constraint on the range of phase by considering two adaptive protocols: one also uses the photon-number measurement with a specially tuned sequence of feedback phase; the other implements the yet-to-be-realized optimal measurement but without fine tuning.