Multipartite entanglement and high precision metrology

Abstract

We present several entanglement criteria in terms of the quantum Fisher information that help to relate various forms of multipartite entanglement to the sensitivity of phase estimation. We show that genuine multipartite entanglement is necessary to reach the maximum sensitivity in some very general metrological tasks using a two-arm linear interferometer. We also show that it is needed to reach the maximum average sensitivity in a certain combination of such metrological tasks.

10 pages including 3 figures, revtex4; v3: typos corrected, published version. An independent work by Philipp Hyllus and coworkers on the same subject can be found in Phys. Rev. A 85, 022321 (2012). See http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevA.85.022321 or http://arxiv.org/abs/1006.4366