Characterization of partially accessible anisotropic spin chains in the presence of anti-symmetric exchange

We address quantum characterization of anisotropic spin chains in the presence of anti-symmetric exchange, and investigate whether the Hamiltonian parameters of the chain may be estimated with precision approaching the ultimate limit imposed by quantum mechanics. At variance with previous approaches, we focus on the information that may be extracted by measuring only two neighboring spins rather than a global observable on the entire chain. We evaluate the Fisher information (FI) of a two-spin magnetization measure, and the corresponding quantum Fisher information (QFI), for all the relevant parameters, i.e. the spin coupling, the anisotropy, and the Dzyaloshinskii–Moriya (DM) parameter. Our results show that the reduced system made of two neighboring spins may be indeed exploited as a probe to characterize global properties of the entire system. In particular, we find that the ratio between the FI and the QFI is close to unit for a large range of the coupling values. The DM coupling is beneficial for coupling estimation, since it leads to the presence of additional bumps and peaks in the FI and QFI, which are not present in a model that neglects exchange interaction and may be exploited to increase the robustness of the overall estimation procedure. Finally, we address the multiparameter estimation problem, and show that the model is compatible but sloppy, i.e. both the Uhlmann curvature and the determinant of the QFI matrix vanish. Physically, this means that the state of the system actually depends only on a reduced numbers of combinations of parameters, and not on all of them separately.