Time-Reversal and Reversible Dynamics in Cavity QED for Quantum Metrology

Quantum-enhanced metrology relies on entanglement to achieve sensitivities beyond the standard quantum limit.

While remarkable progress has been made in generating highly entangled many-body states, extracting their metrological advantage remains a central challenge because the encoded information is often inaccessible to realistic measurements.

A key development of the past decade has been the realization that many-body interactions can play a dual role: they can be used not only to generate entanglement, but also to decode it.

This idea underlies interaction-based readout and time-reversal protocols, in which controlled non-linear dynamics transform weakly encoded signals into experimentally accessible observables.

Cavity quantum electrodynamics (QED) provides a particularly powerful setting for these approaches because it combines collective enhancement, tunable interactions, and controllable reversibility within a single platform.

In this review, we discuss the emergence of time-reversal protocols in cavity QED, from their conceptual roots in Loschmidt echoes to modern implementations of signal amplification through a time-reversed interaction (SATIN), scrambling-enhanced metrology, and more general interaction-based readout schemes.

We examine the physical mechanisms that enable reversible many-body dynamics, review key experimental demonstrations, and discuss future directions involving complex entangled states, nonlinear decoding, and emerging quantum platforms.

Together, these developments suggest that the ability to decode quantum information may become as important as the ability to generate it, establishing reversible many-body dynamics as a central resource for quantum-enhanced sensing.