Noise-powered probabilistic concentration of phase information

Mario A. Usuga Castaneda, C. R. Muller, C. Wittmann, P. Marek, R. Filip, C. Marquardt, G. Leuchs, Ulrik Lund Andersen

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

Abstract

Phase-insensitive optical amplification of an unknown quantum state is known to be a fundamentally noisy operation that inevitably adds noise to the amplified state(1-5). However, this fundamental noise penalty in amplification can be circumvented by resorting to a probabilistic scheme as recently proposed and demonstrated in refs 6-8. These amplifiers are based on highly non-classical resources in a complex interferometer. Here we demonstrate a probabilistic quantum amplifier beating the fundamental quantum limit using a thermal-noise source and a photon-number-subtraction scheme(9). The experiment shows, surprisingly, that the addition of incoherent noise leads to a noiselessly amplified output state with a phase uncertainty below the uncertainty of the state before amplification. This amplifier might become a valuable quantum tool in future quantum metrological schemes and quantum communication protocols.
Original languageEnglish
JournalNature Physics
Volume6
Issue number10
Pages (from-to)767-771
ISSN1745-2473
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2010

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