We derive a general expression of the quantum Fisher information for a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, with the port inputs of an arbitrary pure state and a squeezed thermal state. We find that the standard quantum limit can be beaten, when even or odd states are applied to the pure-state port. In particular, when the squeezed thermal state becomes a thermal state, all the even or odd states have the same quantum Fisher information for given photon numbers. For a squeezed thermal state, optimal even or odd states are needed to approach the Heisenberg limit. As examples, we consider several common even or odd states: Fock states, even or odd coherent states, squeezed vacuum states, and single-photon-subtracted squeezed vacuum states. We also demonstrate that super-precision can be realized by implementing the parity measurement for these states.

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We study the dephasing-assisted precision of parameter estimation (PPE) enhancement in atom interferometer under dynamical decoupling (DD) pulses. Through calculating spin squeezing (SS) and quantum Fisher information (QFI), we find that dephasing noise can improve PPE by inducing SS, and the DD pulses can maximize the improvement. It is indicated that in the presence of DD pulses, the dephasing-induced SS can reach the limit of "one-axis twisting" model, ξ 2 ≃ N −2/3 with ξ 2 being the SS parameter and N the number of atoms. In particular, we find that the DD pulses can amplify the dephasing-induced QFI by a factor of ≃ N/2 compared with the noise-free case, which means that under the control of DD pulses, the dephasing noise can enhance the PPE to the scale of √ 2/N, the same order of magnitude of Heisenberg limit (1/N).

We investigate the possibility to control quantum evolution speed of a single dephasing qubit for arbitrary initial states by the use of periodic dynamical decoupling (PDD) pulses. It is indicated that the quantum speed limit time (QSLT) is determined by initial and final quantum coherence of the qubit, as well as the non-Markovianity of the system under consideration during the evolution when the qubit is subjected to a zero-temperature Ohmic-like dephasing reservoir. It is shown that final quantum coherence of the qubit and the non-Markovianity of the system can be modulated by PDD pulses. Our results show that for arbitrary initial states of the dephasing qubit with non-vanishing quantum coherence, PDD pulses can be used to induce potential acceleration of the quantum evolution in the short-time regime, while PDD pulses can lead to potential speedup and slow down in the long-time regime. We demonstrate that the effect of PDD on the QSLT for the Ohmic or sub-Ohmic spectrum (Markovian reservoir) is much different from that for the super-Ohmic spectrum (non-Markovian reservoir).

We investigate decoherence-free evolution (DFE) of quantum discord (QD) for two initiallycorrelated qubits in two finite-temperature reservoirs using an exactly solvable model. We study QD dynamics of the two qubits coupled to two independent Ohmic reservoirs when the two qubits are initially prepared in X-type quantum states. It is found that reservoir temperature significantly affects the DFE dynamics. We show that it is possible to control the DFE and to prolong the DFE time by choosing suitable parameters of the two-qubit system and reservoirs.

We present a method to accelerate the dynamical evolution of multiqubit open system by employing dynamical decoupling pulses (DDPs) when the qubits are initially in W-type states. It is found that this speed-up evolution can be achieved in both of the weak-coupling regime and the strong-coupling regime. The physical mechanism behind the acceleration evolution is explained as the result of the joint action of the non-Markovianity of reservoirs and the excited-state population of qubits. It is shown that both of the non-Markovianity and the excited-state population can be controlled by DDPs to realize the quantum speed-up.

We propose a scheme to obtain the Heisenberg limited parameter estimation precision by immersing atoms in a thermally equilibrated quasi-one-dimensional dipolar Bose-Einstein condensate reservoir. We show that the collisions between the dipolar atoms and the immersed atoms can result in a controllable nonlinear interaction through tuning the relative strength and the sign of the dipolar and contact interaction. We find that the repulsive dipolar interaction reservoir is preferential for the spin squeezing and the appearance of an entangled nonGaussian state. As an useful resource for quantum metrology, we also show that the non-Gaussian state results in the phase estimation precision in the Heisenberg scaling, outperforming that of the spin-squeezed state.

We study the multi-qubit entanglement transfer in a hybrid circuit quantum electrodynamics system, where the memory and operation registers are, respectively, implemented using nitrogen-vacancy centers in diamond and superconducting charge qubits, because of their respective good coherence and controllability. We show that, with some local operations, both the Bell states and multi-qubit W states can be transferred perfectly in the non-dissipative case. In addition, we also consider the influence of the decoherence on the state transfer. It is found that a high-fidelity state transfer can be achieved only when the decoherence rates are much smaller than the coupling strength between the qubits.