Metrological robustness of high photon number optical cat states

Abstract

In the domain of quantum metrology, cat states have demonstrated their utility despite their inherent fragility with respect to losses. Here, we introduce noise robust optical cat states which exhibit a metrological robustness for phase estimation in the regime of high photon numbers. These cat states are obtained from the intense laser driven process of high harmonic generation (HHG), and show a resilience against photon losses. Focusing on a realistic scenario including experimental imperfections we opt for the case in which we can maximize the lower bound of the quantum Fisher information (QFI) instead of analyzing the best case scenario. We show that the decrease of the QFI in the lossy case is suppressed for the HHG-cat state compared to the even and odd counterparts. In the regime of small losses of just a single photon, the HHG-cat state remains almost pure while the even/odd cat state counterparts rapidly decohere to the maximally mixed state. More importantly, this translates to a significantly enhanced robustness for the HHG-cat against photon loss, demonstrating that high photon number optical cat states can indeed be used for metrological applications even in the presence of losses.