Spectrum analysis with quantum dynamical systems

Measuring the power spectral density of a stochastic process, such as a stochastic force or magnetic field, is a fundamental task in many sensing applications. Quantum noise is becoming a major limiting factor to such a task in future technology, especially in optomechanics for temperature, stochastic gravitational wave, and decoherence measurements. Motivated by this concern, here we prove a measurement-independent quantum limit to the accuracy of estimating the spectrum parameters of a classical stochastic process coupled to a quantum dynamical system. We demonstrate our results by analyzing the data from a continuous-optical-phase-estimation experiment and showing that the experimental performance with homodyne detection is close to the quantum limit. We further propose a spectral photon-counting method that can attain quantum-optimal performance for weak modulation and a coherent-state input, with an error scaling superior to that of homodyne detection at low signal-to-noise ratios.