Heisenberg scaling based on population coding

Abstract

We study Heisenberg scaling of quantum metrology in the viewpoint of population coding. Although Fisher information has been used for a figure of merit to characterize Heisenberg scaling in quantum metrology, several studies pointed out it does not work as a figure of merit because it does not reflect the global structure. As an alternative figure of merit, we propose the mutual information, which connects the number of distinguishable elements of the parameter space in the viewpoint of population coding. We show that several unitary models achieve Heisenberg scaling in this context.