Criticality-enhanced Electric Field Gradient Sensor with Single Trapped Ions

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2304.02050
• Publication Date: 2024-04-10
• Authors: Theodoros Ilias; Dayou Yang; Susana F. Huelga; Martin B. Plenio
• Keywords: 0301 basic medicine; Quantum Physics; 03 medical and health sciences; Physics; QC1-999; Electronic computers. Computer science; FOS: Physical sciences; QA75.5-76.95; Quantum Physics (quant-ph); 7. Clean energy

AbstractWe propose and analyze a driven-dissipative quantum sensor that is continuously monitored close to a dissipative critical point. The sensor relies on the critical open Rabi model with the spin and phonon degrees of freedom of a single trapped ion to achieve criticality-enhanced sensitivity. Effective continuous monitoring of the sensor is realized via a co-trapped ancilla ion that switches between dark and bright internal states conditioned on a ‘jump’ of the phonon population which, remarkably, achieves nearly perfect phonon counting despite a low photon collection efficiency. By exploiting both dissipative criticality and efficient continuous readout, the sensor device achieves highly precise sensing of oscillating electric field gradients at a criticality-enhanced precision scaling beyond the standard quantum limit, which we demonstrate is robust to the experimental imperfections in real-world applications.