Variational-state quantum metrology

Abstract Quantum technologies exploit entanglement to enhance various tasks beyond their classical limits including computation, communication and measurements. Quantum metrology aims to increase the precision of a measured quantity that is estimated in the presence of statistical errors using entangled quantum states. We present a novel approach for finding (near) optimal states for metrology in the presence of noise, using variational techniques as a tool for efficiently searching the high-dimensional space of quantum states, which would be classically intractable. We comprehensively explore systems consisting of up to 9 qubits and find new highly entangled states that are not symmetric under permutations and non-trivially outperform previously known states up to a constant factor 2. We consider a range of environmental noise models; while passive quantum states cannot achieve a fundamentally superior scaling (as established by prior asymptotic results) we do observe a significant absolute quantum advantage. We finally outline a possible experimental setup for variational quantum metrology which can be implemented in near-term hardware.