Measuring Small Longitudinal Phase Shifts via Weak Measurement Amplification

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel weak measurement amplification technique for ultra-small longitudinal phase shifts, demonstrating an order of magnitude enhancement suitable for high-precision applications like gravitational wave detection.

Contribution

The paper proposes and experimentally demonstrates a new weak measurement scheme for measuring tiny longitudinal phase shifts with polarization interferometry, achieving significant amplification.

Findings

Achieved one order of magnitude phase amplification

Demonstrated robustness to interference visibility

Potential applications in gravitational wave detection

Abstract

Weak measurement amplification, which is considered as a very promising scheme in precision measurement, has been applied to various small physical quantities estimation. Since many quantities can be converted to phase signal, it is thus interesting and important to consider measuring ultra-small longitudinal phase shifts by using weak measurement. Here, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a novel weak measurement amplification based ultra-small longitudinal phase estimation, which is suitable for polarization interferometry. We realize one order of magnitude amplification measurement of small phase signal directly introduced by Liquid Crystal Variable Retarder and show its robust to finite visibility of interference. Our results may find important applications in high-precision measurements, such as gravitational waves detection.