Molecular Interferometers: Effects of Pauli Principle on Entangled- Enhanced Precision Measurements
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PAPER • OPEN ACCESS Molecular interferometers: effects of Pauli principle on entangled- enhanced precision measurements To cite this article: P Alexander Bouvrie et al 2019 New J. Phys. 21 123011 View the article online for updates and enhancements. This content was downloaded from IP address 186.13.115.241 on 12/12/2019 at 14:37 New J. Phys. 21 (2019) 123011 https://doi.org/10.1088/1367-2630/ab5b2f PAPER Molecular interferometers: effects of Pauli principle on entangled- OPEN ACCESS enhanced precision measurements RECEIVED 15 August 2019 P Alexander Bouvrie1,5 , Ana P Majtey2,3 , Francisco Figueiredo1 and Itzhak Roditi1,4 REVISED 1 Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Físicas, Rua Dr. Xavier Sigaud 150, 22290-180 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil 6 November 2019 2 Facultad de Matemática, Astronomía y Física, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Av. Medina Allende s/n, Ciudad Universitaria, ACCEPTED FOR PUBLICATION X5000HUA Córdoba, Argentina 25 November 2019 3 Consejo de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas de la República Argentina, Av. Rivadavia 1917, C1033AAJ, Ciudad Autónoma de PUBLISHED Buenos Aires, Argentina 12 December 2019 4 Institute for Theoretical Physics, ETH Zurich 8093, Switzerland 5 Author to whom any correspondence should be addressed. Original content from this E-mail: [email protected] work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Keywords: molecular BEC, fermion interference, quantum metrology licence. Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the Abstract author(s) and the title of Feshbach molecules forming a Bose–Einstein condensate (BEC) behave as non-ideal bosonic particles the work, journal citation and DOI. due to their underlying fermionic structure. We study the observable consequences of the fermion exchange interactions in the interference of molecular BECs for entangled-enhanced precision measurements. Our many-body treatment of the molecular condensate is based on an ansatz of composite two-fermion bosons which accounts for all possible fermion exchange correlations present in the system. The Pauli principle acts prohibitively on the particle fluctuations during the interference process leading to a loss of precision in phase estimations. However, we find that, in the regime where molecular dissociations do not jeopardize the interference dynamics, measurements of the phase can still be performed with a precision beyond the classical limit comparable to atomic interferometers. We also show that the effects of Pauli principle increases with the noise of the particle detectors such that molecular interferometers would require more efficient detectors. 1. Introduction Modern interferometers exploiting particle entanglement are among the most precise measurement devices used so far. They provide a remarkable tool for high precision metrology that have been successfully used, e.g. to detect gravitational waves [1, 2]. Small changes of the quantity to be measured due to the external conditions are mapped to changes of the relative phase of the interference between two photonic or atomic modes. The sensitivity with respect to these changes increases with N, the total number of particle involved in the interference. For interferometers with uncorrelated particles sources, the minimum phase uncertainty is limited by the shot noise, a trace of the particle nature of quantum waves. However, the shot noise limit (also called standard quantum limit), for which the maximal phase precision scales as Dqsn µ 1 N, can be overcome by using entangled particle resources, such as spin squeezed states [3]. The ultimate Heisenberg limit, where the phase uncertainty scales linearly with the number of particles DqH µ 1 N , can be achieved in the limit of infinite squeezing, where the squeezed states become identical to twin Fock states [4]. Twin Fock states, i.e. states with two orthogonal modes populated by the same number of particles, have been produced with both, photons [4, 5] and ultracold bosonic atoms [6–8]. However, entangled-enhanced precision measurements of the resulting interference phase have been performed only in the case of ultracold bosonic atoms [6, 8]. This is mainly because current twin photon beams experiments have much higher particle losses than experiments with twin matter waves. Another interesting source of coherent wave matter, not exploited yet for quantum metrology, are utracold interacting Fermi gases in the molecular Bose–Einstein condensate (mBEC) regime [9, 10], since its lifetime in © 2019 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd on behalf of the Institute of Physics and Deutsche Physikalische Gesellschaft New J. Phys. 21 (2019) 123011 P A Bouvrie et al experiments is much longer than atomic BECs [11, 12]. Interacting bosonic and fermionic atoms behaves extremely different at low temperatures [13], because the Pauli exclusion principle between identical fermions does not allow multiple occupations of the single-particle states of the system. However, in unpolarized two- component ultracold Fermi gases, the Pauli exclusion principle can be circumvented by tunning the interaction between different fermion species. Increasing the (attractive) interaction, fermions bind together forming diatomic molecules, which in the limit of maximum interaction/binding become perfect bosonic molecules [14]. In this strong binding limit all fermion-pairs condense to the same molecular ground state forming a perfect mBEC, whereas weakly bonded molecules leads to quantum depletion of the condensate [15, 16]. The mBECs are composed by N identical pairs of distinguishable fermionic atoms A and B. The quantum depletion of the condensate is a consequence of the fermion exchange interactions between identical (indistinguishable) fermionic atoms A or B [17]. It can be easily confused in the experiments with particle loss effects when only the condensate component is measured without taking into account the total number of particles of the system [18]. Moreover, it is not known how these exchange interactions between identical fermions affect the system’s ability to perform metrology beyond the standard quantum limit. Here, we show the effects of quantum depletion on the phase estimation of two interfering mBECs, essential for future high precision experiments using mBECs. We consider initially prepared twin Fock states in two orthogonal molecular modes, and a interferometric dynamics which is determined by a single parameter, namely, the interference phase θ. The initial twin Fock state of mBECs is obtained by using an ansatz of composite bosons [19] applied to the 6Li Feshbach resonance [17]. We found that condensate depletion reduces the odd/even discrete structure of the typical U-shaped particle distribution that arise when measuring the different numbers of particles populating both modes. Such an odd/ even fluctuation reduction is very similar to that caused by particle losses [5, 6, 8]. Condensate depletion also renders the standard deviation of the interfering mBECs to be smaller, as compared with the one given by the ideal BECs interference of bosonic atoms. The phase uncertainty increases with respect to the ideal bosonic case, with the consequent loss of precision in phase estimations. However, we show that the increase in phase uncertainty is not so significant such that entanglement-enhanced precision measurements are also feasible with mBECs. This is because the U-shape of the particle distribution, indicating many-particle entanglement [5, 6],is preserved for small values of the interference phase θ = 1. We also analyze the phase uncertainty considering a Gaussian noise in the particle detectors, and show how the effects of quantum depletion increase with the detection noise. Therefore, molecular interferometers would require more efficient detectors to reach sub-shot noise precision measurements. The article is organized as follows. We introduce the coboson ansatz and its application to two-component Fermi gases in section 2. We thoroughly discuss in section 3 the interference dynamics that we consider for ultracold interacting Fermi gases trapped in a double well potential. In section 4 we show the population imbalance and the standard deviation of two interfering mBECs for different values of the interaction parameter and analyze the effects of the condensate depletion. In section 5 we calculate the phase estimation uncertainty which is inferred from the sensitivity of the state to small rotations around Jˆz axis given by a spin representation Jˆ = (JJJˆˆˆxyz,,) compatible with interference dynamics. Finally, in section 6 we provide a discussion of the results and summarize our conclusions. 2. Coboson ansatz for interacting Fermi gases Feshbach resonance provides a way to tune the scattering length a characterizing interaction between different fermion species, A and B, of a two-component ultracold Fermi gas [13]. This allowed the experimental realization of the BEC–BCS (Bardeen–Cooper–Schrieffer) crossover with ultracold atomic gases [20]. In the molecular BEC regime, the ground state at zero temperature can be described by pair correlated states, also called coboson (composite bosons) states [17, 21, 22]. The cobosons ansatz is given by the successive application of a complex creation operator cˆ† on the vacuum (cˆ†)N ∣Nñ=∣()0, ñ 1 N!cN † where χN is the normalization factor [23]. The operator cˆ creates a two-fermion composite particle as a † ˆ† † † ˆ † † ˆ † function of the elementary fermionic creation operators aˆj and bcj ,ˆ =¼ fab( ˆ11 ,,,, abˆ 22