Limits for molecular spectroscopy from quantum channel discrimination

Abstract:Absorption spectroscopy identifies molecules by detecting frequency-dependent optical loss, and its fundamental limit is a quantum channel-discrimination problem. In this work, we develop a general framework for characterizing the ultimate quantum limit of molecular absorption spectroscopy without collective measurements: we formulate it as an asymmetric quantum hypothesis testing task between different absorption channels. Using a semidefinite-programming formulation, we construct optimal probe states and compare them with coherent-state photon counting, Fock states, and two-mode squeezed vacuum probes. We introduce a random-loss channel model for imperfectly known background transmission, reflecting the fact that a blank experiment need not return all incident photons due to scattering, solvent absorption, or collection losses. Our results show that optimized non-classical probes can substantially outperform conventional laser spectroscopy, and that the advantage is robust to realistic baseline random loss. % In multi-frequency spectroscopy, the optimization also determines how photons should be allocated across absorption lines, revealing an additional resource-allocation advantage beyond single-mode state engineering. We illustrate our framework using infrared detection of 4-nitrophenol against chemically relevant comparison molecules, showing how quantum channel-discrimination methods provide constructive performance limits for molecular spectroscopy under realistic photon constraints.

9 pages, 7 figures, 13 pages of appendices. Comments are welcome

arXiv:2609.27344 [quant-ph]

(or arXiv:2609.27344v1 [quant-ph] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2609.27344 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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