Quantum-Enhanced Sensing from Hyper-Entanglement

Abstract: Hyperentanglement --- simultaneous entanglement between multiple degrees of freedom of two or more systems --- has been used to enhance quantum information tasks such as quantum communication and photonic quantum computing. Here we show that hyperentanglement can lead to increased quantum advantage in metrology, with contributions from the entanglement in each degree of freedom, allowing for Heisenberg scaling in the precision of parameter estimation. Our experiment employs photon pairs entangled in polarization and spatial degrees of freedom to estimate a small tilt angle of a mirror. Precision limits beyond shot noise are saturated through a simple binary measurement of the polarization state. The broad validity of the dynamics considered here implies that similar strategies based on hyperentanglement can offer improvement in a wide variety of metrological tasks.