Optical interferometry at the Heisenberg limit with twin Fock states and parity measurements
- Department of Physics and Astronomy, Lehman College, The City University of New York, Bronx, New York 10468-1589, USA (United States)
Holland and Burnett [Phys. Rev. Lett. 71, 1355 (1993)] have argued that twin Fock states of equal photon number N injected at both input ports of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer lead to phase measurements with accuracies approaching the Heisenberg limit {delta}{phi}{sub HL}=1/(2N). However, the method of phase detection suggested by those authors, obtaining the difference of the photocurrents at the output ports of the interferometer, is not sensitive to the phase difference between the two interferometer paths; in fact, the photocurrent vanishes. In this paper we show that the use of parity measurements on just one of the output modes not only is sensitive to the phase difference but that the sensitivity approaches the Heisenberg limit for large N.
- OSTI ID:
- 20640107
- Journal Information:
- Physical Review. A, Vol. 68, Issue 2; Other Information: DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevA.68.023810; (c) 2003 The American Physical Society; Country of input: International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA); ISSN 1050-2947
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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