Efficient Many-Body Shadow Metrology via Clifford Lensing

Quantum Physics [Submitted on 25 Mar 2026] Efficient Many-Body Shadow Metrology via Clifford Lensing Sooryansh Asthana, Conan Alexander, Anubhav Kumar Srivastava, T. S. Mahesh, Sai Vinjanampathy Quantum probes that enable enhanced exploration and characterization of complex systems are central to modern science, spanning applications from biology to astrophysics and chemical design. In large many-body quantum systems, interactions delocalize phase information across many degrees of freedom, dispersing it away from accessible measurements and limiting the scalability of quantum metrology. Here we show that experimentally accessible Clifford operations acting jointly on quantum states and observables can refocus this distributed information. These operations implement what we term {\it Clifford lensing}--transformations that coherently localize phase information onto a reduced set of degrees of freedom, mapping optimal measurements onto observables of reduced Pauli weight. We establish a correspondence between quantum error-correcting codes and interferometric constructions that enforce deterministic phase kickback, and generalize this to circuits that concentrate many-body phase information onto a controllable subset of qubits. We further develop partial shadow tomography protocols for estimating subsystem-supported phases. We experimentally demonstrate these principles in liquid-state nuclear magnetic resonance systems of up to fifteen qubits, achieving optimal sensing with constrained resources. Our results establish a scalable route to coherent control of information flow in interacting quantum systems, enabling many-body quantum sensing and multimode interferometry across complex architectures. Comments: 14 pages, comments welcome Subjects: Quantum Physics (quant-ph); Other Condensed Matter (cond-mat.other); Optics (physics.optics) Cite as: arXiv:2603.24035 [quant-ph]   (or arXiv:2603.24035v1 [quant-ph] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.24035 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Sai Vinjanampathy [view email] [v1] Wed, 25 Mar 2026 07:48:06 UTC (238 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: quant-ph < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cond-mat cond-mat.other physics physics.optics References & Citations INSPIRE HEP NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)