Quantum enhanced parameter estimation with monitored quantum nonequilibrium systems using inefficient photo detection

Abstract: Many-body quantum systems hosting emergent collective behavior bear the promise to enable quantum enhanced parameter estimation. Formally this means that the variance of the parameter to be estimated decreases faster than $N^{-1}$, where $N$ is the number of particles forming the quantum system. In practice such scaling is challenging to achieve as the underlying many-body correlations are fragile. Moreover, devising the optimal measurements that indeed tap the quantum enhancement is often rather involved. Here we show that the inefficient detection of the photo emission from a dissipative quantum many-body system is sufficient to reach quantum enhanced parameter estimation even when some loss channels remain completely unmonitored. We illustrate our approach by considering the so-called boundary time-crystal, which is a nonequilibrium many-body system that has been realized recently experimentally in cold atomic gases. By analyzing the structure of the temporal correlations of its emission field, we are able to construct a family of near optimal parameter estimation measurements with a simple interferometric setup.