Achieving the Heisenberg limit with Dicke states in noisy quantum metrology

Going beyond the standard quantum limit in noisy quantum metrology is a very challenging task. Here we show how Dicke states can be used to surpass the standard quantum limit and achieve the Heisenberg limit in open quantum systems. The system we study has qubits symmetrically coupled to a resonator and our objective is to estimate the coupling between the qubits and the resonator. The time-dependent quantum Fisher information with respect to the coupling is studied for this open quantum system where the same decay rates are assumed on all qubits. We show that when the system is initialized to a Dicke state with an optimal excitation number one can go beyond the standard quantum limit and achieve the Heisenberg limit even for finite values of the decays on the qubit and the resonator, particularly when the qubits and resonator are strongly coupled. For comparison, we find that the highly entangled GHZ state performs quite poorly. Our results show that one must consider not only the degree of entanglement of an initial probe state, but its resilience to noise in order to achieve optimum sensing performance.