Quantum metrology with a transmon qutrit

Making use of coherence and entanglement as metrological quantum resources allows to improve the measurement precision from the shot-noise- or quantum limit to the Heisenberg limit. Quantum metrology then relies on the availability of quantum engineered systems that involve controllable quantum degrees of freedom which are sensitive to the measured quantity. Sensors operating in the qubit mode and exploiting their coherence in a phase-sensitive measurement have been shown to approach the Heisenberg scaling in precision. Here, we show that this result can be further improved by operating the quantum sensor in the qudit mode, i.e., by exploiting d rather than 2 levels. Specifically, we describe the metrological algorithm for using a superconducting transmon device operating in a qutrit mode as a magnetometer. The algorithm is based on the base-3 semi-quantum Fourier transformation and enhances the quantum theoretical performance of the sensor by a factor 2. Even more, the practical gain of our qutrit-implementation is found in a reduction of the number of iteration steps of the quantum Fourier transformation by a factor log 2/log 3 approx 0.63 as compared to the qubit mode. We show, that a two-tone capacitively coupled rf-signal is sufficient for the implementation of the algorithm.