Estimating the concentration of chiral media with bright squeezed light

Abstract

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.