Generating a 4-photon tetrahedron state: toward simultaneous super-sensitivity to non-commuting rotations

It is often thought that the super-sensitivity of a quantum state to an observable comes at the cost of a decreased sensitivity to other non-commuting observables. For example, a squeezed state squeezed in position quadrature is super-sensitive to position displacements, but very insensitive to momentum displacements. This misconception was cleared with the introduction of the compass state Nature 412 , 712 ( 2001 ) 10.1038/35089017 , a quantum state equally super-sensitive to displacements in position and momentum. When looking at quantum states used to measure spin rotations, N 00 N states are known to be more advantageous than classical methods as long as they are aligned to the rotation axis. When considering the estimation of a rotation with unknown direction and amplitude, a certain class of states stands out with interesting properties. These states are equally sensitive to rotations around any axis, are second-order unpolarized, and can possess the rotational properties of Platonic solids in particular dimensions. Importantly, these states are optimal for simultaneously estimating the three parameters describing a rotation. In the asymptotic limit, estimating all d parameters describing a transformation simultaneously rather than sequentially can lead to a reduction of the appropriately weighted sum of the measured parameters’ variances by a factor of d . We report the experimental creation and characterization of the lowest-dimensional such state, which we call the “tetrahedron state” due to its tetrahedral symmetry. This tetrahedron state is created in the symmetric subspace of four optical photons’ polarization in a single spatial and temporal mode, which behaves as a spin-2 particle. While imperfections due to the hardware limited the performance of our method, ongoing technological advances will enable this method to generate states which out-perform any other existing strategy in per-photon comparisons.