Improving the phase resolution of interferometry is crucial for high-precision measurements of various physical quantities. Systematic phase errors dominate the phase uncertainties in most realistic optical interferometers. Here we propose and experimentally demonstrate a weak measurement scheme to considerably suppress the phase uncertainties by the direct amplification of phase shift in optical interferometry. Given an initial ultra-small phase shift between orthogonal polarization states, we observe the phase amplification effect with a factor of 388. Our weak measurement scheme provides a practical approach to significantly improve the interferometric phase resolution, which is favorable for precision measurement applications.
@article{arxiv.1803.07735,
title = {Phase amplification in optical interferometry with weak measurement},
author = {Li Li and Yuan Li and You-Lang Zhang and Sixia Yu and Chao-Yang Lu and Nai-Le Liu and Jun Zhang and Jian-Wei Pan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.07735},
year = {2018}
}
Comments
7 pages, 4 figures. Accepted for publication in Physical Review A