Understanding and Improving Critical Metrology. Quenching Superradiant Light-Matter Systems Beyond the Critical Point

Abstract: We carefully examine critical metrology and present an improved critical quantum metrology protocol which relies on quenching a system exhibiting a superradiant quantum phase transition beyond its critical point. We show that this approach can lead to an exponential increase of the quantum Fisher information in time with respect to existing critical quantum metrology protocols relying on quenching close to the critical point and observing power law behaviour. We demonstrate that the Cram\'er-Rao bound can be saturated in our protocol through the standard homodyne detection scheme. We explicitly show its advantage using the archetypal setting of the Dicke model and explore a quantum gas coupled to a single-mode cavity field as a potential platform. In this case an additional exponential enhancement of the quantum Fisher information can in practice be observed with the number of atoms $N$ in the cavity, even in the absence of $N$-body coupling terms.