Feasible optical weak measurements of complementary observables via a single Hamiltonian

Abstract

A general formalism for joint weak measurements of a pair of complementary observables is given. The standard process of optical three-wave mixing in a nonlinear crystal (such as in parametric down-conversion) is suitable for such tasks. To obtain the weak value of a variable $A$ one performs weak measurements twice, with different initial states of the "meter" field. This seems to be a drawback, but as a compensation we get for free the weak value of a complementary variable $B$. The scheme is tunable and versatile: one has access to a continuous set of possible weak measurements of pair of observables. The scheme increases signal-to-noise ratio with respect to the case without postselection.

5 pages, 1 figure