Classicality and amplification in postselected weak measurement

Abstract

Nearly thirty years ago the possibility of anomalous weak amplfication (AWA) was revealed by Aharonov, Albert and Vaidman [1]. Recently two papers presents two AWA schemes which are beyond the traditional proposal given by them [14, 15]. At the first glance the two papers seems very different. Ref. [14] discusses the thermal light cross-Kerr effect and finds only postselection can give the amplification effect without interference of the postselected meter states, and Ref. [15] shows that only weak interaction itself can give the amplification effect without postselection. Here the relationships between the two papers are pointed out and a generalized framework for AWA via postselecting a pair of orthogonal final states is shown.