English

Achieving the ultimate quantum timing resolution

Quantum Physics 2021-01-13 v1

Abstract

Accurate time-delay measurement is at the core of many modern technologies. Here, we present a temporal-mode demultiplexing scheme that achieves the ultimate quantum precision for the simultaneous estimation of the temporal centroid, the time offset, and the relative intensities of an incoherent mixture of ultrashort pulses at the single-photon level. We experimentally resolve temporal separations ten times smaller than the pulse duration, as well as imbalanced intensities differing by a factor of 10210^{2}. This represents an improvement of more than an order of magnitude over the best standard methods based on intensity detection.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2009.01069,
  title  = {Achieving the ultimate quantum timing resolution},
  author = {Vahid Ansari and Benjamin Brecht and Jano Gil-López and John M. Donohue and Jaroslav Řeháček and Zdeněk Hradil and Luis L. Sánchez-Soto and Christine Silberhorn},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2009.01069},
  year   = {2021}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T18:16:06.028Z