English

Quantum Fisher information and imperfect detection in a monitored fermion chain

Quantum Physics 2026-07-27 v1 Statistical Mechanics

Abstract

We study the metrological properties of a continuously monitored Kitaev chain in the presence of imperfect detection. The system is conditioned on a no-click record, while each emitted fermion is registered only with probability 0q10\leq q\leq 1. Because the conditional dynamics remains Gaussian, the steady state is fully characterized by the fermionic correlation matrix. This allows a direct evaluation of the quantum Fisher information and of the mean Uhlmann curvature. For perfect detection, the monitored steady state retains a singular critical structure and the quantum Fisher information with respect to the chemical potential becomes super-extensive. For any q<1q<1, imperfect detection introduces a finite smoothing length that rounds the singularity and restores extensive scaling. The detector efficiency behaves instead as a compatible mixed-state estimation parameter, as signaled by the vanishing mean Uhlmann curvature. These results show that incomplete trajectory information destroys the metrological enhancement associated with monitored criticality through a mechanism that differs from ordinary thermal smearing.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.24438,
  title  = {Quantum Fisher information and imperfect detection in a monitored fermion chain},
  author = {Giovanni Di Fresco and Davide Valenti and Angelo Carollo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.24438},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

6 pages, 3 figures