Steady-state force sensing with single trapped ion

Abstract We propose a scheme for detecting time-varying weak forces using a quantum probe consisting of a single spin and quantum oscillator under the effect of collective dissipation. We study the force estimation in the steady-state regime where the information of the force is extracted by measuring observable of the oscillator such as quadrature and mean phonon excitation. We quantify the force sensitivity in terms of quantum Fisher information and show that it diverges approaching the critical spin-boson coupling making the system sensitive to very small force perturbation. We show that close to the critical coupling the measurement of the oscillator quadrature is optimal in a sense that saturates the fundamental Cramer–Rao bound. Furthermore, we study the force estimation in the presence of phonon squeezing and show that it can significantly improve the sensitivity reaching minimal detectable force of order of xN (1xN = 10 −27 N).