No abstract

The SU(1,1) interferometer can be thought of as a Mach-Zehnder interferometer with its linear beamsplitters replaced with parametric nonlinear optical processes. We consider the cases of bright and vacuum-seeded SU(1,1) interferometers using intensity or homodyne detectors. A simplified, truncated scheme with only one nonlinear interaction is introduced, which not only beats conventional intensity detection with a bright seed, but can saturate the phase sensitivity bound set by the quantum Fisher information. We also show that the truncated scheme achieves a sub-shot-noise phase sensitivity in the vacuum-seeded case, despite the phase-sensing optical beams having no well-defined phase.

Homodyne detection is often used for interferometers based on nonlinear optical gain media. For the configuration of a seeded, "truncated SU(1,1)" interferometer Anderson, et al. [ Phys. Rev. A95, 063843 (2017)] showed how to optimize the homodyne detection scheme and demonstrated theoretically that it can saturate the quantum Cramer-Rao bound for phase estimation. In this work we extend those results by taking into account loss in the truncated SU(1,1) interferometer and determining the optimized homodyne detection scheme for phase measurement. Further, we build a truncated SU(1,1) interferometer and experimentally demonstrate that this optimized scheme achieves a reduction in noise level, corresponding to an enhanced potential phase sensitivity, compared to a typical homodyne detection scheme for a two-mode squeezed state. In doing so, we also demonstrate an improvement in the degree to which we can beat the standard quantum limit with this device.