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arXiv:1803.07735 · Physical Review A

Phase amplification in optical interferometry with weak measurement

Li Li, Yuan Li, You-Lang Zhang, Sixia Yu, Chao‐Yang Lu, Nai-Le Liu, Jun Zhang, Jian-Wei Pan

Published Mar 29, 2018• 34 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

Improving the phase resolution of interferometry is crucial for high-precision measurements of various physical quantities. Systematic phase errors dominate the phase uncertainties in most realistic optical interferometers. Here, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a weak measurement scheme to considerably suppress the phase uncertainties by the direct amplification of the phase shift in optical interferometry. Given an initial ultrasmall phase shift between orthogonal polarization states, we observe a phase amplification effect with a factor of 388. Our weak measurement scheme provides a practical approach to significantly improve the interferometric phase resolution, which is favorable for precision measurement applications.

DOI
10.1103/physreva.97.033851

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Improving the phase resolution of interferometry is crucial for high-precision measurements of various physical quantities. Systematic phase errors dominate the phase uncertainties in most realistic optical interferometers. Here, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a weak measurement scheme to considerably suppress the phase uncertainties by the direct amplification of the phase shift in optical interferometry. Given an initial ultrasmall phase shift between orthogonal polarization states, we observe a phase amplification effect with a factor of 388. Our weak measurement scheme provides a practical approach to significantly improve the interferometric phase resolution, which is favorable for precision measurement applications.
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Weak measurement amplification, which is considered as a very promising scheme in precision measurement, has been applied to various small physical quantities estimation. Since many quantities can be converted to phase signal, it is thus interesting and important to consider measuring ultra-small longitudinal phase shifts by using weak measurement. Here, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel weak measurement amplification based ultra-small longitudinal phase estimation, which is suitable for polarization interferometry. We realize one order of magnitude amplification measurement of small phase signal directly introduced by Liquid Crystal Variable Retarder and show its robust to finite visibility of interference. Our results may find important applications in high-precision measurements, such as gravitational waves detection.
Weak value amplification has been applied to various small physical quantities estimation, however there still lacks a practical feasible protocol to amplify ultra-small longitudinal phase, which is of importance in high precision measurement. Very recently, a different amplification protocol within the framework of weak measurements is proposed to solve this problem, which is capable of measuring any ultra-small longitudinal phase signal that conventional interferometry tries to do. Here we experimentally demonstrate this weak measurements amplification protocol of ultra-small longitudinal phase and realize one order of magnitude amplification in the same technical condition, which verifies the validity of the protocol and show higher precision and sensitivity than conventional interferometry. Our results significantly broaden the area of applications of weak measurements and may play an important role in high precision measurements.
Optical interferometry has been widely used in various high-precision applications. Usually, the minimum precision of an interferometry is limited by various technical noises in practice. To suppress such kinds of noises, we propose a scheme which combines the weak measurement with the standard interferometry. The proposed scheme dramatically outperforms the standard interferometry in the signal-to-noise ratio and the robustness against noises caused by the optical elements' reflections and the offset fluctuation between two paths. A proof-of-principle experiment is demonstrated to validate the amplification theory.
We propose to use weak measurements away from the weak-value amplification regime to carry out precision measurements of time delays of light. Our scheme is robust to several sources of noise that are shown to only limit the relative precision of the measurement. Thus, they do not set a limit on the smallest measurable phase shift, contrary to standard interferometry and weak-value-based measurement techniques. Our idea is not restricted to phase-shift measurements and could be used to measure other small effects using a similar protocol.
We propose a scheme called difference weak measurement, and we illustrate its advantages for measuring a small longitude phase shift in high precision. Compared to the standard interferometry and standard weak measurement schemes, the proposed scheme has a much higher resolution in the presence of various practical imperfections, such as alignment error and light intensity variation error. Moreover, we highlight the advantage of utilizing a complex weak value, where its imaginary part can reduce the harmful effect induced by channel decoherence. Finally, we propose a closed-loop scenario to solve the narrow dynamic range problem that exists in the current weak measurement schemes. The difference weak measurement scheme simultaneously fulfills the requirements of high precision, wide dynamic range, and strong robustness, which makes it a powerfully practical tool for phase-shift measurement and other metrological tasks.