Capability comparison of quantum sensors of single or two qubits for a spin chain system

Abstract

Quantum sensing, utilizing quantum techniques to extract key information of a quantum (or classical) system, is a fundamental area in quantum science and technology. For quantum sensors, a basic capability is to uniquely infer unknown parameters in a system based on measurement data from the sensors. In this paper, we investigate the capability of a class of quantum sensors for a spin-12 chain system with unknown parameters. The sensors are composed of qubits which are coupled to the object system and can be initialized and measured. We consider the capability of the single- and two-qubit sensors and show that the capability of single-qubit quantum sensors can be enhanced by adding an extra qubit into the sensor under a certain initialization and measurement setting.