Weak Measurement Amplification of Single-Photon Nonlinearity
Amir Feizpour, Xingxing Xing, Aephraim M. Steinberg · arXiv (Cornell University) · 2010
Observing optical nonlinearities at the single-photon level has long been a challenge, and represents a major milestone for quantum optics. We show that weak measurement can be used to “amplify” nonlinearity, such that the effect of one properly post-selected photon on a second beam may be as large as that of many un-postselected photons. We show that “weak measurement amplification” offers a marked improvement in signal-to-noise ratio in the presence of technical noise with long correlation times. Unlike previous weak measurement experiments, our proposed scheme has no classical equivalent.