Phase sensitivity for an unbalanced interferometer without input phase-matching restrictions

Abstract: The Cram\'er-Rao bound and the quantum Fisher information have been tools used extensively for interferometric phase sensitivity. Most scenarios considering a Mach-Zehnder interferometer with two input sources focused on the phase-matched case, when the Fisher information is maximal. Under this constraint, the best sensitivity is achieved for a balanced (50/50) input beam splitter. In this paper, we take a different approach: we allow the beam splitter transmission coefficient as well as the input phase mismatch to be variable parameters. We then search for a pair of these parameters that maximizes the Fisher information. We find that for the double coherent input the maximum Fisher information can always be reached in the unbalanced case for a carefully chosen input phase mismatch. For the coherent plus squeezed vacuum case we find that under certain circumstances a threshold phase mismatch exists, beyond which the optimum Fisher information is found for the degenerate case. For the squeezed-coherent plus squeezed vacuum case we find that the optimum actually occurs when the squeezing angles of the two inputs are in anti-phase.