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Quantum 2.0 Conference and Exhibition

Weak measurements under dissipation

Lorena Ballesteros Ferraz, John Martin, Yves Caudano

Published Jan 1, 2023• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

We study weak measurements under the influence of dissipation. Even though dissipation harms the anomalous properties of the weak value, we found specific setups in which extracting information from the weak value is feasible.
DOI
10.1364/quantum.2023.qw2a.29

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Abstract We investigate the impact of dissipation, including energy relaxation and decoherence, on weak measurements. While weak measurements have been successful in signal amplification, dissipation can compromise their usefulness. More precisely, we show that in systems with a unique steady state, weak values always converge to an expectation value of the measured observable as dissipation time tends to infinity, in contrast to systems with multiple steady states, where the weak values can remain anomalous, i.e. outside the range of eigenvalues of the observable, even in the limit of an infinite dissipation time. In addition, we propose a method for extracting information about the dissipative dynamics of a system using weak values at short dissipation times. Specifically, we explore the amplification of the dissipation rate in a two-level system and the use of weak values to differentiate between Markovian and non-Markovian dissipative dynamics. We also find that weak measurements operating around a weak atom-cavity coupling can probe the atom dissipation through the weak value of non-Hermitian operators within the rotating-wave approximation of the weak interaction.
We show using statistically rigorous arguments that the technique of weak value amplification (WVA) does not perform better than standard statistical techniques for the tasks of single parameter estimation and signal detection. Specifically we prove that post-selection, a necessary ingredient for WVA, decreases estimation accuracy and, moreover, arranging for anomalously large weak values is a suboptimal strategy. In doing so, we explicitly provide the optimal estimator, which in turn allows us to identify the optimal experimental arrangement to be the one in which all outcomes have equal weak values (all as small as possible) and the initial state of the meter is the maximal eigenvalue of the square of the system observable. Finally, we give precise quantitative conditions for when weak measurement (measurements without post-selection or anomalously large weak values) can mitigate the effect of uncharacterized technical noise in estimation.
Weak values provide a powerful framework for characterizing quantum systems. Their experimental extraction conventionally relies on weak conditioned von Neumann measurements, involving weak interactions and meter states that increase experimental complexity and often limit measurement efficiency. Here we introduce a method to fully characterize path weak-values in a generalized Mach-Zehnder interferometer employing neither meter states nor weak interactions. We experimentally demonstrate the technique in matter-wave interferometry. We identify anomalous weak values and, equivalently, negative quasiprobability distributions, which reflect the nonclassical behavior of the quantum system. The approach relies uniquely on intensity measurements at the output ports of the interferometer combined with controlled relative phase shifts between the paths. The absence of meter states enables considerable simplification of the setup and shorter measurement times, while preserving full access to weak values with comparable or increased accuracy. The scheme is directly applicable to a broad class of experiments involving two-level quantum systems.