Optical interferometry at the Heisenberg limit with twin Fock states and parity measurements

Holland and Burnett [Phys. Rev. Lett. 71, 1355 (1993)] have argued that twin Fock states of equal photon number N injected at both input ports of a Mach-Zehnder interferometer lead to phase measurements with accuracies approaching the Heisenberg limit Δφ_HL=1/(2N). However, the method of phase detection suggested by those authors, obtaining the difference of the photocurrents at the output ports of the interferometer, is not sensitive to the phase difference between the two interferometer paths; in fact, the photocurrent vanishes. In this paper we show that the use of parity measurements on just one of the output modes not only is sensitive to the phase difference but that the sensitivity approaches the Heisenberg limit for large N.