Postselected amplification applied to Mach-Zehnder-interferometer for phase shift measurement of optical coherent states

TL;DR

This paper introduces a postselected amplification scheme for measuring phase shifts in optical coherent states using a Mach-Zehnder interferometer, differing from traditional weak-value amplification, with potential advantages in photon-number scaling.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel PSA scheme for MZI-based phase measurement that extends beyond the AAV limit, offering new insights into amplification and measurement performance.

Findings

The scheme reproduces WVA results in the AAV limit.

Beyond the AAV limit, the photon-number scaling differs from traditional WVA.

Performance analysis shows potential advantages in measurement accuracy.

Abstract

We propose a postselected amplification (PSA) scheme for phase shift measurement of optical coherent states when passing through the Mach-Zehnder-interferometer (MZI). Different from the usual weak-value-amplification (WVA) formulation, the which-path states of the MZI ($\left| 1 \right\rangle $ and $\left| 2 \right\rangle $) cannot be described as sub-system states entangled with the optical coherent states ($\left| 1 \right\rangle $ and $\left| 2 \right\rangle $) separated by the beam-splitter. However, we obtain the same result of the usual WVA in the Aharonov-Albert-Vaidman (AAV) limit, but beyond this limit, the result is different, e.g., the photon-number scaling can be different. We explicitly carry out the amplified phase shift, which is extracted out from the field-quadrature measurement in the dark port of the MZI. We also evaluate the performance quality of the proposed scheme, and analyze the technical advantages by considering possible errors in the quadrature measurement.