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Temperature-enhanced quantum sensing for the cutoff frequency of Ohmic-family environments
Phys. Rev. A 114, 042407 – Published 6 October, 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/xk8h-4lrb
Abstract
We investigate the quantum sensing performance of a dephasing qubit as a probe in Ohmic-family environments, characterized by the coupling strength , the Ohmicity parameter , and the cutoff frequency to be estimated. The performance is quantified by the dimensionless quantum signal-to-noise ratio . We show that the evolution of with the scaled time is independent of , and peaks at an optimal time , yielding optimal sensitivity . We analyze how depends on , and the temperature . Our results demonstrate that, for any Ohmic-family environment, provided that always reaches the upper bound, at zero temperature, and consistently attains at high temperatures. Remarkably, we find that increasing the scaled temperature can enhance by nearly two orders of magnitude compared to its zero-temperature counterpart for certain Ohmic-family environments. Our work reveals that temperature can serve as a resource to enhance sensing precision, as it accelerates the encoding of the cutoff frequency information into the probe state, thereby enabling optimal measurement within a short time window.