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Journal of Optics

Accurately identifying mode indices of Laguerre–Gaussian beams via weak measurements

Bo Wang, Pengyun Li, Tian Chen, Xiangdong Zhang

Published Mar 28, 2017• 5 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Abstract We propose an efficient method to accurately identify two mode indices ( p and l ) of Laguerre–Gaussian (LG) beams simultaneously with weak value measurement (WVM). Concise relations between the spatial displacements from the WVM and two mode indices of LG beams have been obtained. Compared with the traditional measurements, the advantage of using our method is that LG beams with large p and l can be identified precisely. A joint spatial WVM with a looser approximate condition has been presented, which realizes better identification than the individual spatial WVM with correction terms or strict approximation. Furthermore, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the spatial WVM is also discussed.

DOI
10.1088/2040-8986/aa630c

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Abstract We propose an efficient method to accurately identify two mode indices ( p and l ) of Laguerre–Gaussian (LG) beams simultaneously with weak value measurement (WVM). Concise relations between the spatial displacements from the WVM and two mode indices of LG beams have been obtained. Compared with the traditional measurements, the advantage of using our method is that LG beams with large p and l can be identified precisely. A joint spatial WVM with a looser approximate condition has been presented, which realizes better identification than the individual spatial WVM with correction terms or strict approximation. Furthermore, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the spatial WVM is also discussed.
As a special experimental technique, weak measurements extract very little information from the measured system and does not cause the measured state to collapse. When coupling the Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) state with a well-defined pre- and post-selected system of a weak measurement process, there will be an indirect interconnection between the expected value of coordinate operators of the final state and the mode indices of the measured LG state. The mode of the light is impacted very slightly after the weak measurement. Based on this we propose an experiment scheme and have managed to experimentally measure the mode indices of LG beams spanning from l = -6 to l = +6, p = 0 to p = +8 accurately with the final intensity distributions approximatly at their origin.
Here, joint spatial weak measurements with higher-order Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) point states are investigated experimentally. From the intensity patterns of the final LG point states, two dimensional position operators 〈X〉 and 〈Y〉 as well as high-order position operators 〈XY〉, 〈X2 − Y2〉, 〈X3〉, and 〈Y3〉 are extracted simultaneously, from which both the complex weak values and joint weak values of two non-commuting observables can be obtained. The enhancement of joint weak values by the postselection state are analyzed. The simple relationship between the expectation values of position operators and the azimuthal and radial indexes of LG modes allows us to identify the mode indexes directly. A simple and robust scheme based on an optical window is demonstrated to monitor the LG mode indexes. These findings deepen the understanding of the weak measurement and provide an alternate and effective method for LG mode index monitoring.
We proposed and analyzed a scheme of precisely measuring orbital angular momentum (OAM) of the vortex beams with the help of weak measurement process. The orbital angular momentum information lll of the unknown OAM state can be obtained by its spatial displacements. The valid condition of precisely measuring orbital angular momentum was completely discussed. Interestingly, it is shown that the measurement by using the two-dimensional spatial displacements jointly is very useful for precisely measuring the OAM state with a large orbital angular momentum lll. The signal-to-noise ratio of the measurement can be enhanced by increasing the weak-coupling $\ensuremath{\gamma}$ linearly as the valid condition is still satisfied. For fixed $\ensuremath{\gamma}$, the maximal signal-to-noise ratio for each weak value increases with the decrease of the weak value.
We develop a novel technique to measure small angular and lateral displacements of structured light beams. The technique relies on using high-order Hermite-Gaussian (HG) and Laguerre-Gaussian (LG) modes, which have well-defined symmetry under inversion. We show that the displacements of such fields lead to a crosstalk with modes with opposite parity under inversion, which we measure optimally with an interferometric parity sorter. Using this technique, we achieve improvement factors of up 41 in the signal-to-noise ratio using Hermite-Gaussian modes and 21 using Laguerre-Gaussian modes with order up to 20, as compared to the fundamental Gaussian mode. Our results present a viable way of using structured light for metrology that does not demand quantum light or homodyne detection.
Through the von Neumann interaction followed by post-selection, we can extract not only the eigenvalue of an observable of the measured system but also the weak value. In this post-selected von Neumann measurement, the initial pointer state of the measuring device is assumed to be a fundamental Gaussian wave function. By considering the optical implementation of the post-selected von Neumann measurement, higher-order Gaussian modes can be used. In this paper, we consider the Hermite–Gaussian (HG) and Laguerre–Gaussian (LG) modes as pointer states and calculate the average shift of the pointer states of the post-selected von Neumann measurement by assuming the system observable with and for an arbitrary interaction strength, where represents the identity operator. Our results show that the HG and LG pointer states for a given coupling direction have advantages and disadvantages over the fundamental Gaussian mode in improving the signal-to-noise ratio. We expect that our general treatment of the weak values will be helpful for understanding the connection between weak- and strong-measurement regimes and may be used to propose new experimental setups with higher-order Gaussian beams to investigate further the applications of weak measurement in optical systems such as the optical vortex.
The joint weak value is a counterfactual quantity related to quantum correlations and quantum dynamics, which can be retrieved via weak measurements, as initiated by Aharonov and colleagues. In this paper, we provide a full analytical extension of the method described by Puentes et al. [Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 040401 (2012)], to extract the joint weak values of single-particle operators from two-dimensional spatial displacements of Laguerre-Gauss probe states, for the case of the azimuthal index ∣l∣>1|l|>1∣l∣>1. This method has a statistical advantage over previous ones since information about the conjugate observable, i.e., the momentum displacement of the probe, is not required. Moreover, we demonstrate that, under certain conditions, the joint weak value can be extracted directly from spatial displacements without any additional data processing.