Quantum multiparameter estimation with generalized balanced multimode NOON-like states

The simultaneous multiparameter estimation problem using a class of multimode entangled states is investigated in this paper. Specifically, the problem of optical phase imaging is considered, and the quantum probe is taken to be a balanced coherent superposition of components with an arbitrary quantum state in one mode and vacuum states in all the other modes, which is a generalization of the multimode NOON state. The analytical form for the quantum Cram 'er-Rao bound (QCRB) is presented, which shows the performance by providing a lower bound of the estimation uncertainty. It is shown that the NOON state has the worst performance among those in the class of the entangled states considered. We also analyze in detail four different scenarios, which are the NOON state, the entangled coherent state, the entangled squeezed coherent state, and the entangled squeezed vacuum state. From the comparison among these four states, we find that when the mean photon number is fixed, the squeezed vacuum state has the smallest QCRB, followed by the squeezed coherent state, entangled coherent state, and NOON state. Finally, we illustrate that the balanced entangled state can perform better than a more generalized unbalanced form studied in previous works for certain scenarios.