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

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

doi:10.1038/s41377-021-00543-4

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

Articles

- Improving the precision of optical metrology by detecting fewer photons with biased weak measurement
- Light: Science & Applications Vol. 10, Issue 6, Pages: 1070-1077(2021)
- Affiliations：
  
  1.CAS Key Laboratory of Quantum Information, University of Science and Technology of China, 230026 Hefei, China
  2.CAS Center For Excellence in Quantum Information and Quantum Physics, University of Science and Technology of China, 230026 Hefei, Anhui, China
  3.National Laboratory of Solid State Microstructures and College of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China
  4.Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Microstructures, Nanjing University, 210093 Nanjing, China
- Author bio：
  
  Geng Chen (chengeng@ustc.edu.cn)
  ChuanFeng Li (cfli@ustc.edu.cn)
- Funds：
- DOI：10.1038/s41377-021-00543-4
  CLC：
- Published：30 June 2021，
  
  Published Online：17 May 2021，
  
  Received：26 November 2020，
  
  Revised：15 April 2021，
  
  Accepted：21 April 2021
- Accepted：
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Yin, P. et al. Improving the precision of optical metrology by detecting fewer photons with biased weak measurement. Light: Science & Applications, 10, 1070-1077 (2021).
DOI：

Yin, P. et al. Improving the precision of optical metrology by detecting fewer photons with biased weak measurement. Light: Science & Applications, 10, 1070-1077 (2021). DOI： 10.1038/s41377-021-00543-4.

摘要

Abstract

In optical metrological protocols to measure physical quantities

it is

in principle

always beneficial to increase photon number

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.

关键词

Keywords

references

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