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Applied Physics Letters

Ultra-sensitive measurement of third-order optical nonlinearity via weak value amplification

Hongjing Li, Yanjia Li, Jingzheng Huang, Miaomiao Liu, Guihua Zeng

Published Apr 22, 2019• 12 citations
Publisher

Abstract

An ultrasensitive third-order optical nonlinearity measurement was theoretically proposed and experimentally demonstrated based on an extended Sagnac interferometer using weak value amplification. The predictable nonlinear refractive index coefficient (n2) of a nonlinear optical sample (nematic liquid crystals) accorded with the experimental result, which confirmed the rationality and feasibility of the proposed method. The sensitivity of the proposed method was associated with the resolution of the spectrometer and the postselection angle. By choosing a currently available spectrometer, the minimum Kerr phase of about 7.5 × 10−7 rad could be measured. Moreover, low cost and convenient operation of this method might have potential application in third-order optical nonlinearity measurements.

DOI
10.1063/1.5089605

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An ultrasensitive third-order optical nonlinearity measurement was theoretically proposed and experimentally demonstrated based on an extended Sagnac interferometer using weak value amplification. The predictable nonlinear refractive index coefficient (n2) of a nonlinear optical sample (nematic liquid crystals) accorded with the experimental result, which confirmed the rationality and feasibility of the proposed method. The sensitivity of the proposed method was associated with the resolution of the spectrometer and the postselection angle. By choosing a currently available spectrometer, the minimum Kerr phase of about 7.5 × 10−7 rad could be measured. Moreover, low cost and convenient operation of this method might have potential application in third-order optical nonlinearity measurements.
Optical phase measurements play a key role in the detection of macroscopic parameters such as position, velocity, and displacement. They also permit to qualify the microscopic properties of photonic waveguides such as polarization mode dispersion, refractive index difference, and chromatic dispersion. In the quest for ever-better measurement performance and relevance, we report a quantum nonlinear interferometer based on a Sagnac configuration allowing precise, accurate, self-stabilized, and reproductible optical phase measurement. The potential of this system is demonstrated through the measurement of second-order dispersion, namely, chromatic dispersion of a commercial dispersion-shifted fiber at telecommunication wavelength. We demonstrate a precision of 0.007 % , surpassing state-of-the-art measurements by more than one order of magnitude. Additionally, the accuracy of the second-order dispersion value is determined through the measurement of the third-order dispersion, showing a quadratic error as low as 5%. Our system promises the development of photonic-based sensors enabling the measurements of optical-material properties in a user-friendly manner.
We report on the use of an interferometric weak value technique to amplify very small transverse deflections of an optical beam. By entangling the beam's transverse degrees of freedom with the which-path states of a Sagnac interferometer, it is possible to realize an optical amplifier for polarization independent deflections. The theory for the interferometric weak value amplification method is presented along with the experimental results, which are in good agreement. Of particular interest, we measured the angular deflection of a mirror down to 400+/-200 frad and the linear travel of a piezo actuator down to 14+/-7 fm.
High-precision temperature measurements could guarantee temperature difference control accuracy in research and industrial production. To flexibly achieve high precision and large operating temperature range is a crucial problem for temperature measurements. Here, we demonstrate a method for a high-precision temperature measurement based on a weak measurement done using nematic liquid crystals (NLCs). By performing an analysis in the frequency domain, the temperature variation of NLCs is measured using a Sagnac interferometer with appropriate preselection and postselection. In order to obtain a large operating temperature range, there is a relatively large time delay that resulted from NLCs, and an operational principle is deduced explicitly by Jones matrices. In the proposed method, the precision of 3 × 10−6 °C could be achieved by a currently available spectrometer and the operating temperature range can be modulated by the thickness of NLCs. Moreover, the temperature sensitivity of 13.5 nm/°C could be realized for NLCs with 100 μm thickness, which exhibits at least three orders of magnitude larger than the value for other frequency domain analyses.
A total internal reflection system based on the weak value amplification principle is set up for the precise measurement of the thickness of an ultra-thin film. In this system, the film thickness is derived from the change of the double-peak pointer caused by the effective refractive index of the film, which is correlated to its thickness. The sensitivity and resolution of this system reached 2727.21 nm/RIU and 7.2 × 10 − 6 R I U , respectively, determined by using a sodium chloride solution with a refractive index of 1.331911. The growth process of TA/Fe(III) assembled films with thicknesses in the few nanometers range is monitored using the as-set-up system, and the experimental results are consistent with a theoretical calculation based on the Maxwell Garnett effective medium. Additionally, we theoretically calculated the detection limit for the thickness measurement of the film as 22 pm. We clearly provide a potential method for the precise measurement of the thickness of an ultra-thin film.
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.