Overcoming resolution limits with quantum sensing (1811.01762v2)

Abstract: The field of quantum sensing explores the use of quantum phenomena to measure a broad range of physical quantities, of both static and time-dependent types. An important figure of merit for sensing time dependent signals is the spectral resolution, i.e. the ability to resolve two different frequencies. Here we study this problem, and develop new superresolution methods that rely on quantum features. We first formulate a general criterion for superresolution in quantum problems. Inspired by this, we show that quantum detectors can resolve two frequencies from incoherent segments of the signal, irrespective of their separation, in contrast to what is known about classical detection schemes. The main idea behind these methods is to overcome the vanishing distinguishability in resolution problems by nullifying the projection noise.