Volume 5, Issue 1

In this review we discuss how channel simulation can be used to simplify the most general protocols of quantum parameter estimation, where unlimited entanglement and adaptive joint operations may be employed. Whenever the unknown parameter encoded in a quantum channel is completely transferred in an environmental program state simulating the channel, the optimal adaptive estimation cannot beat the standard quantum limit. In this setting, we elucidate the crucial role of quantum teleportation as a primitive operation which allows one to completely reduce adaptive protocols over suitable teleportation-covariant channels and derive matching upper and lower bounds for parameter estimation. For these channels,wemay express the quantum Cramér Rao bound directly in terms of their Choi matrices. Our review considers both discrete- and continuous-variable systems, also presenting some new results for bosonic Gaussian channels using an alternative sub-optimal simulation. It is an open problem to design simulations for quantum channels that achieve the Heisenberg limit.

The laws of quantum mechanics allow to perform measurements whose precision supersedes results predicted by classical parameter estimation theory. That is, the precision bound imposed by the central limit theorem in the estimation of a broad class of parameters, like atomic frequencies in spectroscopy or external magnetic field in magnetometry, can be overcomewhen using quantum probes. Environmental noise, however, generally alters the ultimate precision that can be achieved in the estimation of an unknown parameter. This tutorial reviews recent theoretical work aimed at obtaining general precision bounds in the presence of an environment.We adopt a complementary approach,wherewe first analyze the problem within the general framework of describing the quantum systems in terms of quantum dynamical maps and then relate this abstract formalism to a microscopic description of the system’s dissipative time evolution.We will show that although some forms of noise do render quantum systems standard quantum limited, precision beyond classical bounds is still possible in the presence of different forms of local environmental fluctuations.

Continuous-time quantum walks may be exploited to enhance spatial search, i.e., for finding a marked element in a database structured as a complex network. However, in practical implementations, the environmental noise has detrimental effects, and a question arises on whether noise engineering may be helpful in mitigating those effects on the performance of the quantum algorithm. Here we study whether time-correlated noise inducing non-Markovianity may represent a resource for quantum search. In particular, we consider quantum search on a star graph, which has been proven to be optimal in the noiseless case, and analyze the effects of independent random telegraph noise (RTN) disturbing each link of the graph. Upon exploiting an exact code for the noisy dynamics, we evaluate the quantum non-Markovianity of the evolution, and show that it cannot be considered as a resource for this algorithm, since its presence is correlated with lower probabilities of success of the search.