Photonic polarization gears for ultra-sensitive angular measurements

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Author(s)
D'Ambrosio, Vincenzo
Spagnolo, Nicolo
Del Re, Lorenzo
Slussarenko, Sergei
Li, Ying
Kwek, Leong Chuan
Marrucci, Lorenzo
Walborn, Stephen P
Aolita, Leandro
Sciarrino, Fabio
Griffith University Author(s)
Year published
2013
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
Quantum metrology bears a great promise in enhancing measurement precision, but is unlikely to become practical in the near future. Its concepts can nevertheless inspire classical or hybrid methods of immediate value. Here we demonstrate NOON-like photonic states of m quanta of angular momentum up to m=100, in a setup that acts as a 'photonic gear', converting, for each photon, a mechanical rotation of an angle ? into an amplified rotation of the optical polarization by m?, corresponding to a 'super-resolving' Malus' law. We show that this effect leads to single-photon angular measurements with the same precision of ...
View more >Quantum metrology bears a great promise in enhancing measurement precision, but is unlikely to become practical in the near future. Its concepts can nevertheless inspire classical or hybrid methods of immediate value. Here we demonstrate NOON-like photonic states of m quanta of angular momentum up to m=100, in a setup that acts as a 'photonic gear', converting, for each photon, a mechanical rotation of an angle ? into an amplified rotation of the optical polarization by m?, corresponding to a 'super-resolving' Malus' law. We show that this effect leads to single-photon angular measurements with the same precision of polarization-only quantum strategies with m photons, but robust to photon losses. Moreover, we combine the gear effect with the quantum enhancement due to entanglement, thus exploiting the advantages of both approaches. The high 'gear ratio' m boosts the current state of the art of optical non-contact angular measurements by almost two orders of magnitude.
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View more >Quantum metrology bears a great promise in enhancing measurement precision, but is unlikely to become practical in the near future. Its concepts can nevertheless inspire classical or hybrid methods of immediate value. Here we demonstrate NOON-like photonic states of m quanta of angular momentum up to m=100, in a setup that acts as a 'photonic gear', converting, for each photon, a mechanical rotation of an angle ? into an amplified rotation of the optical polarization by m?, corresponding to a 'super-resolving' Malus' law. We show that this effect leads to single-photon angular measurements with the same precision of polarization-only quantum strategies with m photons, but robust to photon losses. Moreover, we combine the gear effect with the quantum enhancement due to entanglement, thus exploiting the advantages of both approaches. The high 'gear ratio' m boosts the current state of the art of optical non-contact angular measurements by almost two orders of magnitude.
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Journal Title
Nature Communications
Volume
4
Copyright Statement
© The Author(s) 2013. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, providing that the work is properly cited. You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.
Subject
Classical and physical optics
Quantum optics and quantum optomechanics