Entanglement, number fluctuations and optimized interferometric phase measurement

Abstract: We derive a phase-entanglement criterion for two bosonic modes which is immune to number fluc- tuations, using the generalized Moore-Penrose inverse to normalize the phase-quadrature operator. We also obtain a phase-squeezing criterion that is immune to number fluctuations using similar techniques. These are utilized to obtain an operational definition of relative phase-measurement sensitivity, via analysis of phase measurement in interferometry. We show that these measures are proportional to enhanced phase-measurement sensitivity. The phase-entanglement criterion is a hallmark for a new type of quantum squeezing, namely planar quantum squeezing. This has the property that it squeezes two orthogonal spin directions simultaneously, which is possible owing to the fact that the SU(2) group that describes spin symmetry has a three-dimensional parameter space, of higher dimension than the group for photonic quadratures. The practical advantage of planar quantum squeezing is that, unlike conventional spin-squeezing, it allows noise reduction over all phase-angles simultaneously. The application of this type of squeezing is to quantum measure- ment of an unknown phase. We show that a completely unknown phase requires two orthogonal measurements, and that with planar quantum squeezing it is possible to reduce the measurement uncertainty independently of the unknown phase value. This is a different type of squeezing to the usual spin-squeezing interferometric criterion, which is only applicable when the measured phase is already known to a good approximation, or can be measured iteratively. As an example, we calcu- late the phase-entanglement of the ground state of a two-well, coupled Bose-Einstein condensate, similar to recent experiments. This system demonstrates planar squeezing in both the attractive and repulsive interaction regimes.