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Science

Amplifying a Tiny Optical Effect

Kevin J. Resch

Published Feb 7, 2008• 43 citations
Publisher

Abstract

How do you measure a transverse shift of a light beam to within a nanometer? Recently, physicists predicted (1) that light could experience such a shift similar to what happens to electrical currents in semiconductors through the spin Hall effect (2–4). On page 787 of this issue, Hosten and Kwiat (5) use “weak measurement,” a controversial procedure from the foundations of quantum mechanics, to amplify this spin Hall effect in light (SHEL) rather than detecting it directly. In their experiment, they boost the tiny shift by a factor of 10,000, detecting it for the first time and characterizing it at the angstrom scale. This realizes one of the long-standing promises of weak measurement and demonstrates its potential in precision measurements.

DOI
10.1126/science.1154149

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How do you measure a transverse shift of a light beam to within a nanometer? Recently, physicists predicted (1) that light could experience such a shift similar to what happens to electrical currents in semiconductors through the spin Hall effect (2–4). On page 787 of this issue, Hosten and Kwiat (5) use “weak measurement,” a controversial procedure from the foundations of quantum mechanics, to amplify this spin Hall effect in light (SHEL) rather than detecting it directly. In their experiment, they boost the tiny shift by a factor of 10,000, detecting it for the first time and characterizing it at the angstrom scale. This realizes one of the long-standing promises of weak measurement and demonstrates its potential in precision measurements.
Geometric Spin Hall effect of light (SHEL) has attracted considerable attention because of the universality of this variant of the spin Hall shift and its independence on the light-matter interactions and materials properties. However, the magnitude of geometric SHEL is typically very small, in the sub-wavelength domain, making it difficult for direct experimental observation. Here, we have applied weak measurement schemes to amplify and faithfully observe the geometric SHEL. In our experiment, the input beam is pre-selected in linear polarization basis (p- or slinear polarization) and post selections are done at nearly orthogonal linear polarizations (small angle ϵ away from the exact orthogonal).This results in weak value amplification (~cotϵ) of the resulting shift of the beam centroid. Moreover, this process also leads to selective conversion of spatial to angular nature of geometric SHEL, which along with the weak value amplification leads to manifold amplification of the resulting SHEL, enabling its reliable experimental detection. A key feature of our weak measurement scheme is that both the weak perturbation (tiny geometric SHEL) and the post selection are done simultaneously by a single optical element, namely, a linear polarizer. The dependence of the weak value of the geometric SHEL on the pre and the post selection of polarization states in both linear and elliptical basis were also investigated in details. The specifics of the different weak measurement schemes, various intriguing experimental manifestations of the weak value amplified geometric SHEL, their analysis / interpretation via polarization operator based treatment of weak measurements is presented here.
Weak measurements have recently allowed for the observation of the spin-Hall effect of light in reflection or transmission, which is a spin-dependent light beam shift orthogonal to the plane of incidence. We report here the observation of the Imbert-Fedorov (IF) shift via a weak value amplification scheme. The IF effect does not depend on the spin of the incident photon only, but it has richer polarization dependence. We prove that weak measurements allow for a complete experimental characterization of the polarization properties of this tiny optical effect.
In this paper, a method to measure the tiny spin splitting of the spin Hall effect of light (SHEL) using the almost-balanced weak measurement (ABWM) is presented. The ABWM technique uses two orthogonal post-selected states to record all of the information, which is a precise measurement method being different from the standard weak measurement (SWM). The theory model to describe the SHEL measurement based on ABWM is established. As results, the ABWM scheme has a larger amplification factor, reaching ∼105, which is nearly one order of magnitude higher than that of the SWM. When the post-selected angle is less than a certain value, the sensitivity and amplification factor of the ABWM scheme are higher than those of the SWM scheme, while the measurement precision and SNR of the ABWM technique are comparable to those of the SWM scheme. This research may have great potential for the precision metrology or sensing field based on the SHEL measurement.
Get PDF Email Share Share with Facebook Tweet This Post on reddit Share with LinkedIn Add to CiteULike Add to Mendeley Add to BibSonomy Get Citation Copy Citation Text O. Hosten and P. G. Kwiat, "Observing the Spin Hall Effect of Light via Quantum Weak Measurements," in Frontiers in Optics 2007/Laser Science XXIII/Organic Materials and Devices for Displays and Energy Conversion, OSA Technical Digest (CD) (Optica Publishing Group, 2007), paper JTuA4. Export Citation BibTex Endnote (RIS) HTML Plain Text Citation alert Save article
Weak measurements have recently allowed for the observation of the spin-Hall effect of light in reflection or transmission, a spin dependent light beam shift orthogonal to the plane of incidence. We report here the observation of the Imbert-Fedorov shift via a weak value amplification scheme. The Imbert-Fedorov effect does not depend on the spin of the incident photon only, but it has richer polarization dependence. We prove that weak measurements allow for a complete experimental characterization of the polarization properties of this tiny optical effect. OCIS codes: 270.0270, 050.1940, 270.0270.