Improving the precision of optical metrology by detecting fewer photons with biased weak measurement

• 作者: Peng Yin Wen-Hao Zhang Liang Xu Ze-Gang Liu Wei-Feng Zhuang Lei Chen Ming Gong Yu Ma Xing-Xiang Peng Gong-Chu Li Jin-Shi Xu Zong-Quan Zhou Lijian Zhang Geng Chen Chuan-Feng Li Guang-Can Guo
• 来源期刊: 光：科学与应用（英文版）
• 年，卷（期）: 2021,（6）
• 所属期刊栏目: Articles
• 页码范围: 1070-1077
• 页数: 8页
• 语种: 英文

摘要

In optical metrological protocols to measure physical quantities, it is, in principle, always beneficial to increase photon number n to improve measurement precision. However, practical constraints prevent the arbitrary increase of n due to the imperfections of a practical detector, especially when the detector response is dominated by the saturation effect. In this work, we show that a modified weak measurement protocol, namely, biased weak measurement significantly improves the precision of optical metrology in the presence of saturation effect. This method detects an ultra-small fraction of photons while maintains a considerable amount of metrological information. The biased pre-coupling leads to an additional reduction of photons in the post-selection and generates an extinction point in the spectrum distribution, which is extremely sensitive to the estimated parameter and difficult to be saturated. Therefore, the Fisher information can be persistently enhanced by increasing the photon number. In our magnetic-sensing experiment, biased weak measurement achieves precision approximately one order of magnitude better than those of previously used methods. The proposed method can be applied in various optical measurement schemes to remarkably mitigate the detector saturation effect with low-cost apparatuses.