Theory and experiment for resource-efficient joint weak-measurement

Incompatible observables underlie pillars of quantum physics such as contextuality and entanglement. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is a fundamental limitation on the measurement of the product of incompatible observables, a 'joint' measurement. However, recently a method using weak measurement has experimentally demonstrated joint measurement. This method [Lundeen, J. S., and Bamber, C. Phys. Rev. Lett. 108, 070402, 2012] delivers the standard expectation value of the product of observables, even if they are incompatible. A drawback of this method is that it requires coupling each observable to a distinct degree of freedom (DOF), i.e., a disjoint Hilbert space. Typically, this 'read-out' system is an unused internal DOF of the measured particle. Unfortunately, one quickly runs out of internal DOFs, which limits the number of observables and types of measurements one can make. To address this limitation, we propose and experimentally demonstrate a technique to perform a joint weak-measurement of two incompatible observables using only one DOF as a read-out system. We apply our scheme to directly measure the density matrix of photon polarization states.

Quantum mechanical rotation of a photon polarization by Earth’s gravitational field

We describe the quantum mechanical rotation of a photon state, the Wigner rotation—a quantum effect that couples a transformation of a reference frame to a particle’s spin, to investigate geometric phases induced by Earth’s gravitational field for observers in various orbits. We find a potentially measurable quantum phase of the Wigner rotation angle in addition to the rotation of standard fame, the latter of which is computed and agrees well with the geodetic rotation. When an observer is in either a circular or a spiraling orbit containing non-zero angular momentum, the additional quantum phase contributes 10−6 degree to 10−4 degree respectively, depending on the altitude of the Earth orbit. In the former case, the additional quantum phase is dominant over the near-zero classical geodetic rotation. Our results show that the Wigner rotation represents a non-trivial semi-classical effect of quantum field theory on a background classical gravitational field.

On measurement of photon polarization in radiative penguin B decays to baryons

A measurement of the photon polarization in radiative penguin B decays provides a test of the Standard Model and a probe for New Physics, that can lead to a deviation from the Standard Model prediction of left-handed photons in $$b\rightarrow s \gamma $$ b → s γ . We propose a new method to measure the photon polarization using the baryonic decay $$B^- \rightarrow \Lambda \bar{p} \gamma $$ B - → Λ p ¯ γ . The P-violating $$\Lambda $$ Λ -hyperon decay allows a measurement of the $$\Lambda $$ Λ helicity to be performed, which can be uniquely related to the photon polarization in a model-independent way. The $$B^- \rightarrow \Lambda \bar{p} \gamma $$ B - → Λ p ¯ γ decay was recently measured to have a large branching fraction providing a possibility to get meaningful results with the data already available at LHC and B-factory experiments. An increase of the B-meson sample at high luminosity LHC experiments and Belle II should provide a really stringent test by using this method already in the near future.