Exponential advantage in quantum sensing of correlated parameters

Conventionally in quantum sensing, the goal is to estimate one or more unknown parameters that are assumed to be deterministic – that is, they do not change between shots of the quantum-sensing protocol. We instead consider the setting where the parameters are stochastic: each shot of the quantum-sensing protocol senses parameter values that come from independent random draws. In this work, we explore three examples where the stochastic parameters are correlated and show how using entanglement provides a benefit in classification or estimation tasks: (1) a two-parameter classification task, for which there is an advantage in the low-shot regime; (2) an N -parameter estimation task and a classification variant of it, for which an entangled sensor requires just a constant number (independent of N ) shots to achieve the same accuracy as an unentangled sensor using exponentially many ( ∼ 2 N ) shots; (3) classifying the magnetization of a spin chain in thermal equilibrium, where the individual spins fluctuate but the total spin in one direction is conserved – this gives a practical setting in which stochastic parameters are correlated in a way that an entangled sensor can be designed to exploit. We also present a theoretical framework for assessing, for a given choice of entangled sensing protocol and distributions to discriminate between, how much advantage the entangled sensor would have over an unentangled sensor. Our work motivates the further study of sensing correlated stochastic parameters using entangled quantum sensors – and since classical sensors by definition cannot be entangled, our work shows the possibility for entangled quantum sensors to achieve an exponential advantage in sample complexity over classical sensors, in contrast to the typical quadratic advantage.