A superresolution-based quantum spectrometer using a pair of phase-controlled spatial light modulators satisfying the Heisenberg limit

Recently, a phase-controlled superresolution has been proposed and experimentally demonstrated using the classical light of a continuous-wave laser to overcome the shot-noise limit in classical physics as well as to solve the limited N in N00N-based quantum sensing. Here, the superresolution is applied to a quantum spectrometer using phase-controlled spatial light modulators (SLMs) in a Mach-Zehnder interferometer. For the validity of the proposed method, a general solution is analytically derived from the SLM-based projection measurements, and numerical calculations are conducted for the N-dependent phase sensitivity and resolution. Besides, a classical spectrometer is numerically compared, whose resolution is the same as the superresolution. However, the phase sensitivity of the SLM-based quantum spectrometer shows a quantum advantage due to the reduced scan range, whereas the classical one has no change.