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arXiv:1805.08376 · Physical Review Letters

Simultaneous Measurement of Multiple Parameters of a Subwavelength Structure Based on the Weak Value Formalism

Anthony Vella, Stephen T. Head, Thomas G. Brown, Miguel Angel Alonso

Published Mar 27, 2019• 22 citations
arXivHTMLPDF

Abstract

A mathematical extension of the weak value formalism to the simultaneous measurement of multiple parameters is presented in the context of an optical focused vector beam scatterometry experiment. In this example, preselection and postselection are achieved via spatially varying polarization control, which can be tailored to optimize the sensitivity to parameter variations. Initial experiments for the two-parameter case demonstrate that this method can be used to measure physical parameters with resolutions at least 1000 times smaller than the wavelength of illumination.

DOI
10.1103/physrevlett.122.123603

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The first experimental realization of a measurement of the weak value of a variable, a concept recently introduced by Aharonov, Albert and Vaidman, is presented. Weak measurements (measurements of a weak value) address the situation in which the separation of the eigenvalues caused by a weakly interacting measurement device is small compared to the width of the distribution of the individual eigenvalues. By appropriate choice of the pre- and post-selected state it is possible that the overlapping eigenvalues will interfere producing a value outside the range of eigenvalues. We demonstrate that the weak value is a practical method of amplifying and resolving the separation between overlapping eigenvalues in an optical experiment proposed by Duck, Stevenson and Sudarshan. In this experiment a birefringent crystal spatially separates two linear polarization components of a Gaussian laser beam by a distance much smaller than the beam waist.
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We experimentally investigate the relative advantages of implementing weak-value-based metrology versus standard methods. While the techniques outlined herein apply more generally, we measure small optical beam deflections both using a Sagnac interferometer with a monitored dark port (the weak-value-based technique), and by focusing the entire beam to a split detector (the standard technique). By introducing controlled external transverse detector modulations and transverse beam deflection momentum modulations, we quantify the mitigation of these sources in the weak-value-based experiment versus the standard focusing experiment. The experiments are compared using a combination of deterministic and stochastic methods. In all cases, the weak-value technique performs the same or better than the standard technique by up to two orders of magnitude in precision for our parameters. We further measure the statistical efficiency of the weak-value-based technique. By postselecting on 11%1 of the photons, we obtain 9999%99 of the available Fisher information of the beam deflection parameter.
Measuring the polarization state of light has become a challenging study owing to its requirement to simultaneously extract the phase and amplitude parameters with high precision. Here, we present a weak measurement (WM) scheme with two pointers to determine a general polarization state. For the output spectrum from the WM regime, one pointer with the light frequency is used to measure the phase parameter while the other with the post-selected probability is to measure the amplitude. The optimized regime permits the simultaneous measurements of two parameters since the shift results of both two pointers are read in the same working regions. The simulated results show high sensitivity for both two parameters, and high precision that can be comparable with that by other existing schemes. Our scheme can be applied to measure other complex physical effects, providing a method for future ultra-sensitive sensing and metrology.