Scattershot photon sources are known to have useful properties for optical quantum computing and boson-sampling purposes, in particular for scaling to large numbers of photons. This paper investigates the application of these scattershot sources towards the metrological task of estimating an unknown phase shift. In this regard, we introduce three different scalable multimode interferometers and quantify their quantum Fisher information performance using scattershot sources with arbitrary system sizes. We show that two of the interferometers need the probing photons to be in certain input configurations to beat the classical shot-noise precision limit, while the remaining interferometer has the necessary symmetry which allows it to always beat the classical limit no matter the input configuration. However, we can prove that all three interferometers give the same amount of information on average, which can be shown to beat the classical precision limit. We also perform Monte Carlo simulations to compare the interferometers in different experimentally relevant regimes, as a function of the number of samples.

中文翻译：

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通过散射采样的多模式计量

众所周知，散射光子源具有用于光量子计算和玻色子采样目的的有用特性，特别是用于缩放到大量光子。本文研究了这些散射源在估计未知相移的计量任务中的应用。在这方面，我们介绍了三种不同的可扩展多模干涉仪，并使用具有任意系统尺寸的散射源量化它们的量子 Fisher 信息性能。我们表明，其中两个干涉仪需要探测光子处于某些输入配置以超过经典散粒噪声精度限制，而其余干涉仪具有必要的对称性，无论输入配置如何，它都可以始终超过经典限制。然而，我们可以证明所有三个干涉仪平均提供相同数量的信息，可以证明这超过了经典的精度限制。我们还进行了蒙特卡罗模拟，以比较不同实验相关机制中的干涉仪，作为样本数量的函数。