Estimating the concentration of chiral media with bright squeezed light

The concentration of a chiral solution is a key parameter in many scientific fields and industrial processes. This parameter can be estimated to high precision by exploiting circular birefringence or circular dichroism present in optically active media. Using the quantum Fisher information formalism, we quantify the performance of Gaussian probes in estimating the concentration of chiral analytes. We find that bright-polarization squeezed state probes provide a quantum advantage over equally bright classical strategies that scales exponentially with the squeezing factor for a circularly birefringent sample. Four-fold precision enhancement is achievable using state-of-the-art squeezing levels and intensity measurements. VC2022 Author(s). All article content, except where otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license

Automated summary

The concentration of a chiral solution is a key parameter that can be estimated to high precision using circular birefringence or circular dichroism. By using the quantum Fisher information formalism, researchers have found that bright-polarization squeezed state probes provide a quantum advantage over classical strategies, resulting in four-fold precision enhancement.