Precision in estimating independent local fields: attainable bound and indispensability of genuine multiparty entanglement

Abstract

Estimation of local quantum fields is a crucial aspect of quantum metrology applications, and often also forms the test-bed to analyze the utility of quantum resources, like entanglement. However, so far, this has been analyzed using the same local field for all the probes, and so, although the encoding process utilizes a local Hamiltonian, there is an inherent "nonlocality" in the encoding process in the form of a common local field applied on all the probes. We show that estimation of even independent multiple field strengths of a local Hamiltonian, i.e., one formed by a sum of single-party terms, necessitates the utility of genuine multipartite entangled state as the input probe. The feature depends on the choice of the weight matrix considered, which is full-rank and contains non-vanishing off-diagonal terms. We obtain this result by providing a lower bound on the precision of multiparameter estimation, optimized over input probes, for an arbitrary positive semi-definite weight matrix. We show that there exists a weight matrix for which this bound is always attainable by the Greenberger-Horne-Zeilinger (GHZ) state, chosen in a certain basis. Furthermore, we find the parametric form of the most general optimal state for three parties. We also show that no pure product state can achieve the lower bound. Finally, for an arbitrary weight matrix and an arbitrary multiparty local encoding Hamiltonian, we prove that using a probe that is in any mixed state provides a precision lower than that obtainable using pure states. To emphasize the importance of the weight matrix considered, we also prove that the choice of identity operator as the same - thereby ignoring the "off-diagonal" covariances in the precision matrix - does not require the use of genuine multiparty entanglement in input probes for attaining the best precision, and the optimal probe can be a pure product.