Heisenberg-limited Bayesian phase estimation with low-depth digital quantum circuits

Abstract Optimal phase estimation protocols require complex state preparation and readout schemes, generally unavailable or unscalable in many quantum platforms. We develop a scheme that achieves near-optimal precision up to a constant overhead for Bayesian phase estimation, using simple digital quantum circuits with depths scaling logarithmically with the number of qubits. This is done by approximating the optimal initial states with products of Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger states for Gaussian prior phase distributions with arbitrary widths. We study various protocols that employ this class of states with different levels of measurement and post-processing complexities, and obtain improvement compared to previously proposed schemes. We then use our scheme to address phase slip errors and laser noise, which impose a major limitation in Bayesian phase estimation and atomic clocks. Based on our scheme, we develop an efficient protocol to suppress this noise that outperforms existing methods.